Native American fashion
Indigenous designers frequently incorporate motifs and customary materials into their wearable artworks, providing a basis for creating items for the haute couture and international fashion markets.
By selecting motifs and iconography easily identified as part of Indigenous culture, they were able to gain acceptance and develop a market share with mainstream buyers.
Many have taken Indigenous themes and incorporated them into their works, while others have taken specific garments and updated them to contemporary aesthetics by changing necklines, sleeve lengths, hemlines, and other features.
For the most part, these collections failed to take into consideration the shift in clothing trends among Indigenous peoples brought about by assimilation policies or by access to tailoring training and industrially produced textiles.
[5] However, forced assimilation policies throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries focused on eradicating Native American culture, including religious observance, language, and other traditional practices.
[6] Later, policies such as the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act changed the strategy for the education of Native peoples, encouraging them instead to reconnect with their cultures, including the creation of traditional dress.
[8] During the same decade, Lloyd Kiva New, a Cherokee who had graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago began touring throughout Europe and the United States with clothing and accessory lines he had designed, using hand-woven and dyed fabrics and leather crafts.
[10] Recognizing the need to reduce labor costs, he began combining machine work with handcrafting and instituted an apprenticeship program to meet increasing production demands while gearing his designs for the up-scale market.
[11] Gaining coverage from national magazines like Harper's Bazaar and The New Yorker, New began selling his bags at the Elizabeth Arden Salon and Neiman Marcus.
[16] He began to consult with artists and incorporated silk screened fabrics using native motifs, such as Pima basket weaving designs, Hopi pottery patterns, Navajo and Zuni yei elements, drawing from a variety of tribal aesthetics.
[19] The purpose of the school was to provide an education that fostered pride in students' Indigenous heritage and featured the development of skills designed to improve their economic opportunities.
[25] During the 1970s, Native American designers began to make a name for themselves during the Indian and Natural movements, such as Jewel Gilham (Blackfeet) and Remonia Jacobsen (Otoe/Iowa).
[26] Gilham catered to working women, designing pantsuits and long dresses made of polyester fabrics with felt insets depicting geometric figures and native motifs.
[33] In 1982, when Wendy Ponca (Osage)[34] took over the fashion design courses at the IAIA, she renamed them fiber arts in accordance with other accredited university curricula, offering three levels of instruction.
[36] Ponca changed the direction of Native American fashion[35] by allowing the designers to determine whether their works would include traditional influences and media.
[49] Jeanette Ferrara (Isleta Pueblo) opened a design studio known for coats and vests incorporating cotton, wool, and velvet, and Ardina Moore (Quapaw/Osage) founded Buffalo Sun in Oklahoma in 1983.
[50] Geraldine Sherman (Lakota) designed for non-native marketer and anthropologist Helene Hagan to produce garments featuring Native American iconography.
The exhibit featured designs by Joyce Begay-Foss (Navajo), Loretta Tah-Martin (Apache-Ponca) and Michelle Tsosie Naranjo (Santa Clara-Navajo-Laguna Pueblo-Mission), among others.
[55] The following year, the Red Earth Festival was established in Oklahoma City, showcasing creations by non-native designer Michael Kors, along with Phyllis Fife (Muscogee), to demonstrate that Native clothing was part of mainstream fashion.
Among those who favored classic, clean lines were Betty David (Spokane),[59] known for her shearling coats;[60] Dorothy Grant (Haida),[59] who trained at Vancouver's Helen Lefeaux School of Fashion Design and whose work includes images of flora and fauna of the Pacific Northwest, formline art and basketry designs;[45][61] and Penny Singer (Navajo),[59] who added photographic images on fabric to her traditional men's and women's shirts and accessories decorated with beads and ribbon work.
[62] Angela DeMontigny (Chippewa-Cree/Métis) of southwestern Ontario, a Canadian First Nation designer, also followed the classic traditional lines, with edgy elements based initially on leather and suede garments before branching into jewelry and accessories.
[65][66] Other Native American designers from the early 1990s included the master weaver Margaret Roach Wheeler (Chickasaw/Choctaw), who earned a master's degree in art at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, under the tutelage of Marjorie Schick;[45][67] Aresta LaRusso founded Deerwater Design in Flagstaff in 1994 featuring items made of silk or wool fabrics and deer or elk skin.
[71] Among Ponca's students at IAIA in the 1990s were the designers Pilar Agoyo (Ohkay Owingeh/Cochiti/Kewa), who works on costuming for several films, including Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) and The Avengers (2012),[72] and Patricia Michaels (Taos Pueblo), who went on to take second place in season 11 of Project Runway.
[59][74] Tazbah Gaussoin (Picuris Pueblo/Navajo), Consuelo Pascual (Navajo/Maya), and Rose Bean Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo) were other Ponca students who began making a name in fashion circles in the 1990s.
[79] Similarly to Native Uprising founded two decades previously, the collective of designers aimed through collaboration to improve inclusion of Indigenous artists.
[80] As Native American designers recognized that marketing to Indigenous peoples alone limited their business sustainability, they increasingly created clothing that is derived from their cultural heritage but has been adapted to appeal to a larger aesthetic.
[5] Jessica Metcalf (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), who wrote the "Beyond Buckskin" blog, opened a fashion boutique in Gardena, North Dakota the same year.
