A couple weeks ago, I made a fashion post on WC featuring a dress I picked up at American Eagle. I purchased the dress because I thought it was cute, didn't necessarily think twice about the design on the dress. It was pointed out to me that this dress, which was produced by a mass retailer, was a prime example of cultural appropriation.
Honestly, I had very little idea of what that meant until the ladies of this community educated me a bit further.
Cultural appropriation can be defined as "Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else's culture without permission. This can include unauthorized use of another culture's dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc. It's most likely to be harmful when the source community is a minority group that has been oppressed or exploited in other ways or when the object of appropriation is particularly sensitive, e.g. sacred objects."
Even though I see these types of cultural prints on clothing from mass retailers on the regular, I wasn't fully aware of how it exploited those cultures. Educating myself on this issue made me pretty upset that mass retailers don't treat these cultural symbols with any sort of respect.
I have a ways to go in understanding the difference between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation, however, retailers have a pattern of disregarding cultural groups when it comes to mass producing products. We can still appreciate cultural pieces; instead of buying them from a mass retailer, buy them from the group that originally curated those pieces.
More articles on Cultural Appropriation: Sharp Tongue Charlie, The Sadness of Pencils, Jezebel, Refinery29
