Sweet Threads

If we cast our gaze back to the 1980s, there was a time that Native students and alumni of the Institute of American Indian Arts hosted guerrilla fashion shows on and around the Plaza. Rather than downtown Santa Fe’s current status as a commercial playground for gawking tourists, these artists unleashed experimental designs and performances which contributed to a Santa Fe that, according to fashion curator and IAIA Assistant Professor Amber-Dawn Bear Robe (Siksika Nation), actually had, “nightlife filled with young people and not so many rules and regulations.”

Pushing limits was their hallmark, Bear Robe says, adding that, as designer Marcus Amerman (Choctaw), who took part in those impromptu fashion gatherings, recently told her, “We would just go into the IAIA collections, grab a few things we wanted to wear—like jewelry or whatever—and wear it in these fashion shows.”

If Vivienne Westwood made waves in the punk fashion scene with her London-based shop SEX, so, too, did Cochiti Pueblo designer/artist Virgil Ortiz’s Heat: A Freak Boutique similarly unsettle the fabric of Santa Fe in the early aughts as one of the first Indigenous fashion boutiques on the Plaza.

To celebrate happenings such as that and other Indigenous fashion-related achievements, Bear Robe has collected and will moderate a panel of heavy-hitter Native fashion designers for The OGs of Indigenous Fashion at SITE Santa Fe this week. At the event, participants will have a chance to hear stories from Patricia Daniels (Taos Pueblo), Orlando Dugi (Diné) and Amerman—and anyone who attends will also receive a free ticket to the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts’ (MoCNA) exhibition, Art of Indigenous Fashion, curated by Bear Robe and on view through Jan. 8.

“You can look at the clothing and you can appreciate it or you can think it’s ugly,” Bear Robe says. “There are definitely some more conceptual pieces in the exhibition, but it’s still connecting to the body.”

The accompanying exhibit in part highlights IAIA alums from its 60-year history and shows off Indigenous design languages that exist, according to promo materials from MoCNA, “beyond buckskin, beads, and fringe.”

We spoke with Bear Robe in the lead-up to the panel.

SFR: What inspired you to host your forthcoming panel?

Amber-Dawn Bear Robe: It’s part of the programming for the exhibition I curated at MoCNA. I was doing research for a paper I was commissioned to write for Crystal Bridges [Museum of American Art] by fashion curator Michelle Tolini Finamore, whose exhibition, Fashioning America: Grit to Glamour, opened just after mine.

In talking with designer Virgil Ortiz, he’s like, “The OGs of Indigenous fashion, we have a lot of stories.”

I wanted this panel to be exciting and to draw people in with the fun histories of the Native fashion scenes in Santa Fe that nobody knows about; all of these firsts that happened in this region. There’s always been this layer of basic knowledge that got public attention with the Peabody Essex exhibition, Native Fashion Now—for instance, Lloyd Kiva New, and Virgil Ortiz’s collaboration with Donna Karan in the early 2000s. Yet, there’s more to it than that. These stories that not only have happened, but are still happening.

What is Indigenous design language?

We have our own identity. It’s a matter of how to describe that. I say Indigenous designers are the original couturiers of North America. But that is still a European concept. When you look at how Indigenous art, culture and fashion has been framed historically—whether it’s utilitarian or for visual aesthetics—it’s been framed as curiosity; artifact and an anthropological object. But when you look at historical designs from that same time period in Europe, it’s considered high fashion. But you don’t get more couture than killing a walrus, gutting the walrus, using every part of it and sewing the intestines together to make not only a life saving waterproof jacket—a brilliant feat of engineering—but something that’s also aesthetically so beautiful.

Which gets me thinking: Why are there not more designers working with fish skin? It is a really sturdy material with an amazing number of uses. There’s a [Smithsonian Magazine] article, “Does Fish Skin Have a Future in Fashion?,” published in 2021; John Galliano’s Autumn 2002 collection had an Atlantic salmon skin jacket—definitely appropriation. I know some artists working with that material, but not pushing it to the level of Galliano, who has a huge driving machine behind him. Much different resources. And money drives things. Doing this exhibition for MocNA, I couldn’t even get animal materials from my region across the border without a painstaking, expensive, two-year-long process.

Who is a Native designer whose work you find particularly innovative?

I wore Orlando Dugi at the Crystal Bridges Gala, and I could not walk 2 feet without somebody stopping me and being like, ‘Who are you wearing?’ You don’t get any more American glamour than what I was wearing, which was based on the story of the Navajo warrior twins who were born to kill the monsters that were killing humans on Earth. Dugi hand-embroidered a gold sun on the front and back of the jacket in collaboration with another Navajo artist, Ryan Singer. It was visually stunning. It was outrageous, and not what people would typically think of as Indigenous fashion. I would say I stuck out, but in a good way.

My current thought on the difference people ascribe to craft versus fashion is that craft is embedded while fashion is extracted, at least in terms of mainstream fashion. I’m interested in place-based fashion. Are there places for young Indigenous designers to build fashion knowledge in New Mexico?

It’s a growth area. Lloyd Kiva New’s whole driving educational goal at the Institute of American Indian Arts was to have a fashion textiles program. And that doesn’t exist. It’s a matter of Indigenous students who want to go down that fashion path to go to mainstream institutions. I think it is important for Native designers to go and learn this very tough corporate world of fashion and its many facets in order to play that game, learn the business, and learn all the different trajectories of the fashion world.

The OGs of Indigenous Fashion: 3-5 pm Saturday, Nov. 12. Free. SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, (505) 989-1199