“An interesting quand(a)ry…”

I happened to fall on this article last month while shopping for traditional Ethiopian clothing online and forgot to post it. The question that was being investigated was if the British young designer Matthew Williamson had been ‘inspired’ by Ethiopian traditional wear or if he merely copied the exact designs and passed them off as his own. As the article presumptively expounds, officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were not very happy with his deed because the the very dignified Ethiopian culture is threatened to be westernized by such copies. I believe the issue is that the Western model is displaying the cultural Ethiopian clothing in a setting that does not give praise or even refer to Ethiopia and its people save for the design of the dress and the fabric, which I am sure everyone will agree are exact copies of the traditional Ethiopian clothing and are meant to speak for themselves.
What I found most compelling about the whole article is somebody’s comment that followed, and it said:

missbruno says:

January 25th, 2008 at 8:33 am

This is an interesting quandry and it brings up the an age old questions: who owns culture? Culture is transient. Culture is synthesized and disseminated over and over again. Can culture even BE owned or claimed? Well, I think if culture can be co-opted and appropriated then the implication is that it CAN be owned. And Williamson’s work seem like complete carbon copy to me. He is trying to own something that is not his.

Well, this comment really perplexed me because I realized that I do not understand what culture is exactly. Missbruno first argues that “culture is transient. Culture is synthesized and disseminated over and over again.” My understanding of this is that culture cannot be owned in the strictest sense of the word, but then again it is also true that culture is “appropriated”, so what can we make of this comment with respect to the nature of culture, along with but not emphasizing the idea that Williamson shamelessly copied the Ethiopian traditional dress?