Adidas based a shoe on a Zapotec huarache, then said it was sorry. A former fast-fashion designer follows what happened next. The line between inspiration and appropriation in fashion can be very fine. I saw how blurry that line could become during my more than 20 years as a fashion designer, including for fast-fashion retailers. I still remember my first sample-shopping trip to New York City with a buyer.
We spent two full days moving through stores in SoHo and along Fifth Avenue, buying pieces that caught our eye for their fabrics, prints, shapes, or details. Back in the design room, we hung the samples on a rack and presented them to the vice president of design.
Think Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada … except she was slightly less intimidating, but certainly not interested in having us second-guess her opinions. She pointed to a print, color, or detail she thought had potential, and I then took that direction to my team of graphic artists, who worked on prints for the collections I was designing. At the time, it felt like a normal part of the job.
Over the years, though, I saw how easily ideas and designs could move through the industry with little discussion of their origins. I was never sent on sample-shopping trips to Mexico or other countries with strong Indigenous traditions. But what if one of the blouses I picked up on that New York trip came from a retailer that had already borrowed from an Indigenous design?
By the time it landed on our store racks, would any of us have known where that print or embroidery we used for “inspiration” really came from? By the time I left that industry, I seriously wondered where inspiration ended and copying began. That question becomes even more important when culturally significant designs are reproduced for profit without permission, credit, or compensation.
At that point, inspiration can cross into appropriation, and even exploitation. So when fashion borrows from Indigenous traditions, the question is: Who gets the credit, and who gets paid? When Culture Becomes Commercial Fashion Fashion has borrowed from traditional dress for generations, and Indigenous designs and textiles have repeatedly appeared on international runways and in fast-fashion stores.
Mexico has challenged fashion brands over the years. In 2015, Isabel Marant’s Étoile collection incorporated designs associated with the traditional blouse of Santa María Tlahuitoltepec. In 2020, Mexico again questioned Marant over Indigenous designs in her Fall/Winter 2020–21 collection. In 2019, Mexico’s Ministry of Culture questioned Carolina Herrera over Indigenous motifs used in her Resort 2020 collection.
These aren’t simply decorative patterns. A motif can identify a community, a tradition, and generations of shared knowledge. Removing it from that context can erase the people who created it. Adidas Apologized. Then What? One of the most recent cases involved Adidas and fashion designer Willy Chavarria.
In early August 2025, they presented the “Oaxaca Slip-On,” inspired by the traditional huarache from the Zapotec community of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag in Oaxaca. On August 7, 2025, Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI) said the design had been used without the community’s authorization. Two weeks later, Adidas apologized publicly in Yalálag and promised continued dialogue.
According to the Oaxacan government, rather than asking for money, community representatives proposed a cultural center, clinical laboratory, sports facility, scholarships, and water-treatment improvements, framing them as reparation rather than the sale of their culture. What happened next is unclear.
(Related: The Devil Wears Trendy Trash: The Dark Side of Ultra-Fast Fashion) A year after Adidas’ apology, Yalálag still wasn’t informed about what it would receive. In August 2026, El Universal Oaxaca reported that the community didn’t know what stage the mediation had reached or what progress had been made toward reparations. That uncertainty followed the mixed messages in 2025.
In October, federal undersecretary for cultural development Marina Núñez Bespalova said a restitution contract involving community infrastructure was already in place. A month later, Yalálag officials, municipal president Eric Ignacio Fabián, and legal adviser Juan Maldonado Vargas told El Imparcial de Oaxaca that talks were still underway to define and sign a reparation agreement.
I contacted Maldonado Vargas and a Yalálag huarachero who