
In the year 2018, The Fashion and Apparel Industry reported a worldwide revenue of $481.9 billion and expects a rise to $713 billion by the year 2022. The beauty industry has an incredibly influential power on many businesses worldwide, and is continuing its ascent with the curiosity of new and exotic fashion. The fashion and beauty industry have used its increase of online and smartphone access to expand its global marketing.

The justification for fashion and beauty is that it allows for a specific level of expression and power. Freedom of expression has changed into a way of identifying individualism and has enhanced for a deeper-rooted definition of beauty. Throughout the past few decades, society as a whole has undergone various erratic social changes, resulting in the change in perception of conventional social viewing of one another.
In today’s society, we are seeing a more prominent presence of women in the beauty and fashion industry; and with a higher trend of social media, as a society we are using technology to inspire authentic beauty in fashion – giving product consumer the potential of choosing how they want to be viewed by others and painting a positive light on the true values of businesses.
An example of promoting beauty in an incredibly successful business is Nike. Despite its more well-known mission of distributing products for athletic use, Nike has recently taken strides toward promoting the beauty of female athletes.
The business has used influential women like Serena Williams, an American professional tennis player, to advocate for their company.
Despite Williams prodigious success, this formerly ranked number one tennis star has received criticism and an intense amount of body shaming throughout her athletic career. Through Serena William’s strength and determination, the athlete was able to partner up with Nike and create a platform to transform the body of a genuine individual into the body of a champion!

While many brands like Nike have used their wealth and success to uplift customers, other businesses have let cultural symbols predestined to illustrate beauty in various cultures to become materialized into most recent trend. Those trends then become copied by consumers worldwide who don’t understand the significance of that particular symbol or the influence it would have on that culture in which it was originated from.
Trends, especially ones based off of pre-existing cultural symbols, are now posted on social media as a personal beauty statement and is considered as cultural appropriation.
When cultural elements of a minority are borrowed or stolen by those who choose to take the symbol out of context — debatably mocking the symbol’s origination, cultural appropriation becomes present. Beauty, especially in the form of business and distribution of products has become its own culture that often disregards historical significance and loss of consciousness.
An example of this unconscious sense of avoiding cultural appropriation is Kim Kardashian’s recent beauty product releases. In late June of 2019, Kim Kardashian release a line of athletic wear that she named “Kimono,” which is a Japanese term for a loose-sleeved robe.
Kardashian had envisioned shape ware that blended to the skin tone of various bodies sizes. The product was posted via Twitter with the hashtag #KimOhNo and was used more than 50,000 times on Twitter.

Not only was she criticized for this product, she was also criticized for wearing Fulani braids, which are typically worn by woman of color and originated in African regions. When businesses don’t take the time to fully understand what they are producing, and when consumers don’t take enough initiative to do research before posing on Instagram with their latest fashion that was stolen from a culture.