Authors

Kathryn Caric¹;  ¹ University of the Arts London, UK

Discussion

This paper examines the discourse on appropriation and the Romanian blouse focusing specifically on Louis Vuitton’s appropriation of the Sibiu blouse in their “By the Pool” collection released in 2024. This debate illustrated the tense lines of how labour, heritage, craft, nationalism and appropriation interact with the fashion industry, as well as the willingness of local craft and community groups to collaborate with Louis Vuitton to combat appropriation. The Romanian cultural appropriation activist group La Blouse Roumaine quickly jumped on the incident calling on Louis Vuitton to give credit and collaborate with the local communities that made the blouse which resulted in Louis Vuitton removing the appropriated blouse from their website. Within Romania, this started a public debate between La Blouse Roumaine and the revitalization group Semne Cusute which argued that as the appropriated blouse was a heritage item, the local community didn’t have ownership of the blouse Louis Vuitton appropriated. They also pointed out that Louis Vuitton already had a factory in the Sibiu region of Romania which brought up different questions of exploitation and cultural exchange. Semne Cusute is a sewing group of 50,000+ members that handmake Romanian blouses while following traditional guidelines from the pre-WWI and Interwar Era in Romania. As a revitalization group, Semne Cusute has worked with museums upcycling old damaged blouses that aren’t fit for display and creating blouses that illustrate the destruction of climate change in Romania. They have been involved with the submission of the Romanian and Moldovan traditional blouse with embroidery on the shoulder to UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage. Semne Cusute felt that as Louis Vuitton followed the codes of the garment it was not as destructive as appropriation by fast fashion brands and that while it was unethical to use a Romanian blouse without credit, which illustrated an opportunity for collaboration with Louis Vuitton and helped educate Romanian consumers on the actual value of a well-made blouse which allows local producers to raise their prices. This paper will contribute to the literature on cultural appropriation of the Romanian blouse by highlighting the importance of intra-country understandings of object context and appropriation.