Returning to their roots: how global brands are rediscovering cultural heritage

June 22, 2026

For decades, globalization encouraged brands to speak a universal language. Luxury, fashion, hospitality, and design increasingly adopted aesthetics that could travel seamlessly from New York to Dubai, from Paris to Shanghai. Yet as markets became more interconnected, local identity emerged as a key source of distinction.

Across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, brands are turning to traditional craftsmanship, regional materials, and cultural narratives to build identities grounded in place. Heritage is no longer a reference to the past, but a framework for contemporary relevance.

Italy’s lesson in the power of place

Italy has long demonstrated the strength of place-based storytelling. Dolce & Gabbana transformed Sicily into a global luxury narrative, drawing on Baroque architecture, religious iconography, ceramics, and Mediterranean culture. Regional identity becomes a language that extends far beyond its geography.

Other Italian brands follow a similar logic. Brunello Cucinelli builds its identity around Solomeo, a small Umbrian village restored as both production site and philosophical anchor. The brand’s story is inseparable from its investment in place, craft, and community.

Loro Piana takes a broader view of heritage, focusing less on geography than on material provenance. From vicuña in the Andes to cashmere in Mongolia, its identity is rooted in rare fibers and long-standing relationships with producer communities, where expertise is transmitted across generations.

Zegna, meanwhile, remains closely tied to Piedmont and the Oasi Zegna, a vast natural reserve created by the founding family. It frames luxury through stewardship, linking territory, environment, and legacy.

Craftsmanship as a competitive advantage

Loewe has become one of the most prominent advocates for craft in contemporary luxury. Through the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, it highlights traditional techniques from around the world, reframing artisans as active contributors to contemporary culture rather than custodians of the past.

In the United States, Emily Bode advances a different model of heritage. Through Bode, she reconstructs garments from antique textiles, deadstock materials, and archival pieces, drawing on early American quilting, domestic needlework, and workwear traditions. Rather than anchoring identity to place, her work treats material archives as living systems of memory. Preservation becomes a design method, where garments are assembled through layered histories rather than created from blank slate.

Asia’s heritage renaissance

Across Asia, heritage has become a driver of innovation. In Japan, brands such as Visvim and Kapital reinterpret traditional dyeing techniques and textile crafts through a contemporary lens, building global audiences around slow production and material depth. Their appeal lies in the integration of historical process and modern form.

In China, Shang Xia was founded to revive and reinterpret Chinese craftsmanship, from bamboo weaving and porcelain to lacquer work and furniture design. Its aim is not to replicate Western luxury, but to articulate a contemporary Chinese aesthetic rooted in continuity.

In India, Sabyasachi Mukherjee has elevated indigenous craft systems onto the global stage. Hand embroidery, weaving, and block printing form the core of his work, linking luxury directly to artisan communities and inherited technical knowledge.

A new expression of luxury in the Middle East

Across the Middle East, heritage is increasingly used as a design language for contemporary identity.

Lebanese studio Bokja reinterprets regional embroidery and textile traditions through furniture and interior pieces that merge storytelling with craft. In Saudi Arabia, Abadia collaborates with women artisans across the region, embedding traditional techniques into modern silhouettes. More broadly, designers across the Gulf draw on Arabic calligraphy, Islamic geometry, desert landscapes, and vernacular architecture to create design systems grounded in cultural specificity.

Beyond fashion

The return to cultural roots extends beyond fashion. In hospitality, luxury hotels increasingly collaborate with local artisans to shape spaces that reflect their surroundings. Moroccan zellige, Japanese ryokan traditions, and European stonework and textiles are reinterpreted to create environments rooted in place. Across regions, local materials and craft systems are becoming central to guest experience rather than decorative detail.

The value of belonging somewhere

Whether in Sicily, Kyoto, Rajasthan, Beirut or Riyadh, craftsmanship represents more than a production method. It carries accumulated knowledge, memory, and identity.

The most compelling brands today are not those that aim for universality, but those that embrace specificity. Their narratives emerge from landscapes, communities, and traditions that cannot be easily replicated.

In an increasingly standardized world, cultural heritage has become one of the most distinctive forms of value a brand can possess. The future may belong not to brands that belong everywhere, but to those that know exactly where they come from.

CPM