Where is the line between culturally appropriate dress and cultural appropriation?

It was hard to look at Ivanka Trump’s wardrobe during her India trip this week and not ask the question. After all, from her opening mother-of-pearl embroidered jacket to her final kurta dress, she swerved from her usual pencil skirts and high heels to make her clothes part of the content of her communications. And there were many: two and a half days, six looks, all excitedly chronicled by local style watchers.

Indeed, Ms. Trump, in Hyderabad, the capital of the southern Indian state of Telangana, to lead the United States delegation to the eighth annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit, had begun making headlines with fashion even before she arrived. Critics pointed out what they called the hypocrisy of Ivanka Trump (the individual) in making a speech on the importance of female empowerment and equality, when Ivanka Trump (the company) is believed to employ low-wage workers in countries such as … India.

Ms. Trump did not address the issue during her various speeches and panels, but she did use dress in a notable way.

Unlike her stepmother, Melania Trump, who seemed uninterested in leveraging fashion for political capital during her tour through Asia with President Trump, Ivanka Trump seemed to have embraced the idea wholeheartedly. If, at least at the beginning, a little one-dimensionally.