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Fendi's ₹9 lakh Navratri bag: the craft is Indian. The price isn't.

A ₹9.6 lakh mirror-work bag set off a cultural-appropriation fight. Here's the real story — and where that Indian craft lives, priced honestly.

If you've been online this Navratri, you've seen it: Fendi's Baguette 26424 “Multicolour Re-Edition” — a handbag covered in bright embroidery, beads and tiny mirrors, priced at roughly $10,000 (about ₹9.6 lakh). The internet immediately named it the “Navratri bag,” because it looks unmistakably like the mirror-work potli and cloth bags you'll find in the markets of Gujarat and Rajasthan for a few hundred rupees.

Then came the debate.

Industry voices didn't hold back. Business leaders and designers publicly called it out as cultural appropriation — repackaging India's traditional mirror-work (shisha embroidery, a craft centuries old in Rajasthan and Gujarat) as European luxury, without visibly crediting the artisans or the heritage behind it. The comparison that went viral was blunt: a ₹500 design from a Gujarat street, sold for ₹9 lakh with a foreign logo.

But here's the nuance most hot-takes skipped. The bag is reportedly embroidered with around 39,500 beads and 475 mirrors, taking over 138 hours of work — and that work was done by Indian artisans, at Mumbai's Chanakya School of Craft. Fendi did credit the Chanakya artisans in earlier material. So the craftsmanship isn't stolen — it's Indian, made by Indian hands. What's missing, critics argue, is the heritage story being told loudly and proudly, rather than quietly folded into a European luxury price tag.

The debate isn't really about one bag. It's about a pattern: the world's biggest labels keep discovering that Indian craft is extraordinary — and Indian shoppers keep paying import prices for their own heritage.

You don't have to.

The exact crafts everyone's fighting over — mirror-work, hand-embroidery, block-print, gota — are alive and thriving in India's independent labels. Brands that work directly with these artisans, tell the story openly, and price it honestly. The same soul, without the ₹9-lakh markup or the erasure.

That's exactly why we built litchy: to help you discover India's independent labels — the ones keeping these crafts alive — and buy from them directly. Every brand, checked by us.

This Navratri, skip the imitation. Discover the real thing on litchy.