Dressed for the Festival, Made for the Landfill: Dark Patterns, Cultural Appropriation, and Greenwashing in Indian Fashion E-Commerce

<p>India's fashion e-commerce sector is among the world's fastest-growing, with the online fashion retail segment projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 24.2% between 2025 and 2032. Major Indian fashion platforms routinely deploy culturally resonant visual design, including festival imagery, regional craft motifs, handloom aesthetics, and artisan-adjacent language, as central drivers of seasonal consumption. This paper develops a conceptual framework for understanding how such design choices perform a double function: they accelerate fast fashion purchasing by anchoring it in cultural legitimacy, while simultaneously appropriating the sustainability signifiers of the craft traditions they visually invoke. Drawing on scholarship in human-computer interaction, design ethics, consumer behavior, and postcolonial cultural studies, as well as first-hand practice-based research in Indian craft documentation and festive retail design, this paper makes three connected theoretical claims. Indian festival retail interface design functions as a culturally amplified consumption accelerant, combining established dark-pattern mechanisms with emotional cultural legitimacy in ways that existing HCI literature has not examined together. Handloom and craft aesthetics are regularly extracted from their social and ecological contexts and redeployed as sustainability signals in campaigns that primarily sell industrially produced fast fashion. Sustainability programs appended to volume-consumption architectures are structurally incapable of addressing the harm that the core interface is designed to produce. The paper closes by proposing a research agenda for empirical work and directions for responsible design practice at the intersection of cultural heritage, e-commerce UX, and environmental accountability.</p>