From Cultural Branding to Cultural Empowerment through Social Innovation: I Was a Sari—A Design-Driven Indian Case Study

Branded content appears to be the most promising frontier of contemporary companies’ strategies within our hyperconnected society. This new context requires brands to demonstrate an increasing capacity to engage customers in continuous interactions and cultural exchanges through on-going narratives co-created with their audiences and perceived as authentic components of their hybrid physical-digital daily experiences. Within the physical-digital networks of interactions, (fashion) brands assume a new social role largely as original contents’ producers and editors. Products lose their ultimate meaning while narrations that deliver brands’ values become the true reason the public engages in conversation with the brands and recognises their social and cultural influence as their actual value. Maintaining distance from the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility as a mere greenwashing act, this paper presents an exemplary design practice seeded and nurtured in Mumbai and later grown globally, rooted in the idea that social innovation and culturally intensive industries such as fashion can enfranchise social innovation.