confessions from a founder:  on clapping.

Hi ,

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Years ago, a buyer in Los Angeles spent weeks falling for our collection. A run of phone calls and emails, a meeting penciled in for Paris. Then he saw three words on the label, “Made in India,” and canceled. He told me he had other bags, the Italian ones, that he needed to buy first. I wrote about that moment years back in an op-ed for Business of Fashion. I’m dragging it back out because the underlying math hasn’t changed years later. Also, I’m Cancerian; Forgive, never forget.

OK, I’m going to argue that the “made in” label, in today’s world, should be used for diversification. The days of “Made in X, Y, Z European Country” should now be interchangeable with “Made in the Developing World” without eyes flinching.

But to do this, I’m going to take one step backward: Why do we even have “made in” labels? What exactly is their purpose? Some would say that, legally, for trade compliance and economic transparency; And others would say that you can benchmark a quality standard from how and where something is made. Fine, I’ll give it a pass; That might actually be a fair thing to worry about.

Except in 2024, prosecutors in Milan went looking for those exact labels, and even found them tucked inside the lining of “Made in Italy.” One luxury house, by the prosecutors’ account, was paying a workshop 53 euros to put together a bag that sold for 2,600. People working long days for a few euros an hour, some of them sleeping where they sewed. This is the same continent that’s been selling us the gold (or as I’ve called it, the white) standard for about a century.

So I want to be careful here. This isn’t a story simply about the West being the villain and the global South being the saint. Extractive exploitation doesn’t really belong to a single country, though you might find more of it in countries that have been historically marginalized… over… and over… and over again. It hides wherever nobody’s clapping loudly enough to make people look.

And that’s the part I keep circling back to: Fashion still treats where a thing is physically made like a secret to be managed, not a fact to be proud of. The industry’s gotten a little braver about putting “responsibly sourced” on the website, even maybe now showcasing the geopolitics of supply chain. We’ve gotten almost no braver about saying, out loud, whose hands did the work and in which town.

Last summer a luxury house sent sandals down a Milan runway that looked exactly like Kolhapuri chappals, the leather sandals artisans in Maharashtra and Karnataka have been hand-cutting for generations. Initially, there was no mention of where the shape came from, who’d been making it the whole time, or why it mattered. The backlash got loud, India-sized loud, and to their credit, the brand eventually acknowledged the Indian roots, signed agreements with local leather corporations, and has now produced a proper run of them in the very regions the design walked in from. Good outcome. It just took an internet’s worth of clapping back to earn a footnote that should have been the entire chapter on day one.

Now flip it over, because some people get this right, whether because of optics or a good heart, without being forced into it. There’s one creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, in particular, who has been working with India-based ateliers for more than 25 years, and she says so, constantly, on the record. She makes sure everyone knows how many months go into the pieces her house is producing. The pride is in the product and the community.

Here is the part the old hierarchy never wanted to admit: The global south has been making things to a luxury standard the entire time, often for the very houses that won’t print it on the label. The standard was never the problem. The willingness to clap for it was.

At behno New York, our own leathers take more than 30 days to reach the quality we expect, and there are real people, with names, behind every stitch of that. I want to clap for our Maison partners responsibly, as someone very aware of the panopticon model, which can also debilitate communities, even when offering genuine praise. When a brand hides where it makes things, it isn’t protecting quality. It’s protecting a story, the one where luxury can only be born in a handful of European postal codes. That story, honestly, is one of the past. A childhood fable we need to learn and move on from.

So here’s the beat: I’d rather clap loudly and point clearly than murmur a label and hope nobody asks. Credit is cheap to give and expensive to withhold. Name the spaces. Name the country. Put your hands next to the price.

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​Anyway, enough from me for now.

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More soon, and a little louder,

Shivam

Founder, behno New York