New Delhi, July 24 -- A corner of the fashion world recently became consumed with an oddly familiar question: who owns the design language? The trigger was Rahul Mishra's latest Paris Haute Couture Week collection, Devi, inspired by the sculpted female figures found in temples across India. Parallels were drawn with Gaurav Gupta and Tarun Tahiliani and videos posted on their social media accounts, revisiting their collections inspired by temple iconography. Before long, the conversation had turned into yet another social media trial over originality.

The thing is, designers, like most creative practitioners, routinely return to the same artworks, historical periods, cultural symbols and craft traditions, filtering them through their own ...