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Find out which Native designers are coming to fashion week in Santa Fe
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Beginning on Wednesday, May 7, the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts will host its second annual SWAIA Native Fashion Week (SNFW), featuring Indigenous designers from across North America.
The fashion curator Amber-Dawn Bear Robe (Siksika Nation) teamed up with SWAIA to launch SNFW last year, and this year’s event is being organized by the association’s executive director, Jamie Schulze (Northern Cheyenne/Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate), in partnership with Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week in Canada.
Bear Robe, meanwhile, is producing an independent event, Native Fashion Week (NFW) at the Santa Fe Railyard, starting Thursday, May 8.
Organizers of both fashion weeks emphasize that the two events will complement each other, drawing larger audiences than either organization could achieve separately. They expect that additional satellite events may pop up in coming years, as well.
“The more the merrier,” Bear Robe said. “That’s what fashion weeks are about — to expand over the whole city.”
She cited the example of New York Fashion Week, which includes numerous simultaneous “fashion weeks” produced by independent organizations, in addition to the official schedule organized by the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA).
“We would eventually like to expand fashion week to have runway shows on Canyon Road, as well as the (Santa Fe) Botanical Garden and the Scottish Rite (Masonic) Temple, to have runway shows city-wide,” Bear Robe said.
“The plan is to get the fashion industry to come here,” she added.
That’s already starting to happen. The president and CEO of CFDA, Steven Kolb, is flying to Santa Fe this year to participate in an NFW panel discussion alongside the Indigenous artist and designer Jamie Okuma (Luiseño, Wailaki, Okinawan, and Shoshone-Bannock).
“That’s huge,” Bear Robe said.
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Another panel will feature Ashley Callingbull (Cree), the first Indigenous model to be crowned Miss Universe Canada in 2024.
“Indigenous fashion has been my world, my drive, my passion and my vision for decades,” Bear Robe said.
She has been organizing fashion-related events, including museum exhibitions and runway shows in Santa Fe since moving to the area in 2012, including multiple collaborations with the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.
Bear Robe champions a wide range of Indigenous design, from streetwear to haute couture, and from pioneering figures to the latest emerging designers. But even as public awareness of Indigenous fashion continues to grow, she finds that many people still hold a narrow view of what they expect it to look like.
“It’s beyond buckskin, beads and leather,” Bear Robe said. “With diverse designers coming from across this vast country of America, as well as Canada, they have very different influences, backgrounds and Indigenous knowledge and land knowledge that’s going to be informing how they express themselves.”
“Then, you have some designers who work with unconventional materials to express very conceptual ideas,” she continued. “Someone may look at it and ask, ‘How is this Native?’ Well, it’s Native because a Native designer produced it. It doesn’t need to fall into a pigeonholed idea of what Native fashion needs to look like.”
SACRD THNDR By Alex Minitopyes Nehiyaw-Anishinaabe
One of the least traditional designers participating in NFW is Alex Manitopyes of SACRD THNDR.
“I’m showing ‘Neon Blood,’ which is a fierce, tech-forward collection that merges protest and luxury,” Manitopyes said. “At the center are black leather LED bags with strobing, colorful lights. The accessories are just as loud — oversized earrings and bolo ties in neon acrylic, featuring bold icons like lightning bolts, snakes and sharp statements. This collection is made to shake up things.”
Manitopyes’ fashion is rooted in their own identity.
“As a nonbinary Nehiyaw-Anishinaabe designer, my work is about reclaiming space and challenging colonial systems,” they said. “I design to honor the ones before me and protect the ones coming next. It’s about activism expressed through art, because rage is sacred.”
“Fashion can be sacred and dangerous at the same time,” they continued. “‘Neon Blood’ is for the ones who know their power, speak their truth and wear it like warpaint.”
Manitopyes said Native Fashion Week is important “because we need more stages that center us, not tokenize us.”
“Native Fashion Week is more than a showcase — it’s a space of art, innovation and power. It allows Indigenous artists to create narratives, celebrate our gifts and build a future.”
T.O.C. Legends House of Design By Himikalas Pam Baker Squamish, Kwakwaka’wakw
Several designers are participating in both SNFW and NFW, debuting two unique collections in the same weekend. One of these designers is Himikalas Pam Baker.
Baker’s brand T.O.C. Legends House of Design fuses Indigenous craft traditions with classic Hollywood glamor, and it’s become one of the most globally recognized names in Indigenous fashion design. T.O.C. stands for Touch of Culture.
“For SWAIA, I will be showcasing the ‘Nobility’ collection, which will be referencing the story of my great-great-grandmother,” Baker said. “The other collection (for NFW) is called ‘The Undersea Kingdom,’ and that references my mother’s family from the northwest coast of Vancouver Island. So, I’ve done a lot of hand dying and screening on the pieces of images of starfish and killer whales, who are messengers.”
Baker works with a small team, including a cousin who does most of her beadwork and embroidery.
“I do all the dying and printing and designing myself,” Baker said.
When Baker founded T.O.C. Legends in 1988, there were “only a handful of serious First Nations designers in Canada,” she said. “But now, social media has been able to uplift everyone.”
Despite being, in her words, “one of the OG designers,” Baker is constantly experimenting with new materials and techniques, including sublimation printing on sequins and making complex patterns with laser cutting.
“One thing I like to do is to stay up-to-date and attempt new techniques every year,” Baker said.
Products of My Environment By The Son of Picasso Kiowa
Products of My Environment is a brand by Albuquerque designer The Son of Picasso, who stopped using his “government name,” Ben Nelson, in 1995. For 10 years, he went by Ahn-Hia-Ohm, his Kiowa name, but he has been using the nom-de-plume The Son of Picasso for two decades.
“I use my self-identifying name as a teaching tool to bring light to Native erasure and forced assimilation,” he said.
The Son of Picasso launched Products of My Environment six years ago. He’d had a decadeslong painting career prior to that and saw fashion as a way to expand his artistic vision into three dimensions.
“Instead of just going into the classic idea of sculpture, I went into human anatomy and real-life sculpture,” he said.
Products of My Environment draws on streetwear influences from the artist’s youth.
“I was born and raised in the ‘war zone’ (Albuquerque’s International District) in the 1980s and ’90s, when sneaker culture was at its height,” he said.
He felt that other Indigenous streetwear designers sometimes lacked “realness.”
“Being actually from the street, I can look at someone and tell they’re not from where I’m from. So, for them to step into that arena and pretend (that they are), it’s a slap in the face.”
He uses Products of My Environment to tell authentic stories, rooted in his own lived experience.
Randi Nelson Designs By Randi Nelson Bonaparte/St’uxwtéws First Nation
Randi Nelson’s runway-ready looks have appeared at the Academy Awards and the Cannes Film Festival, and she has been awarded Best in Show at the Santa Fe Indian Market.
“My work focuses on Indigenous materials of wealth,” she said.
Materials such as trout leather, porcupine quills, abalone and dentalium shells are every bit as difficult to obtain and prepare as silks, ostrich feathers and other materials which European designers have traditionally regarded as luxurious. And, in some cases, they have an even longer history of use as luxury materials.
“Dentalium shells have been traded between our people. They were used as currency and then stitched to clothing to show wealth and status within a community,” she said. “So, these materials belong on a runway just as much as silk does.”
Nelson lives in a remote part of Yukon, Canada. “There’s more moose than people here,” she said.
Spending time with local flora and fauna inspires much of her work, along with connecting with local Indigenous communities who maintain sustainable relationships to the land.
Nelson’s NFW collection this year focuses on furs, which have been sustainably harvested and prepared by Indigenous trappers and artisans from Yukon.
“I try to source all my materials from Indigenous artisans and creators, and I support different families throughout Turtle Island for my practice,” Nelson said. “The furs and hides that I use come from animals that can often feed a family. It’s not just hunting for the fur or the hide. It’s a practice that’s honoring all of the animal and using all of the animal.”
Original Landlords By Jeremy Arviso Diné, Hopi, Akimel O’odham and Tohono O’odham
Jeremy Arviso began his creative life as a graffiti artist with passionate but somewhat unfocused energy.
“I was a really angry 17-year-old,” he said. “I was doing a lot of self-education, reading books and just trying to figure out more about being a Native American, because they didn’t teach us s--- in high school.”
He said he even wrote a letter to activist Leonard Peltier. But Arviso’s admirable activist inclinations and desire to express himself politically through art were counteracted, he said, by self-destructive habits, which took him many years to overcome.
“The world of fashion saved me,” he said, “because I’m able to translate those experiences into something that people can see walk across the stage.”
Original Landlords is known for its clever political symbolism, including the Original Landlords logo itself, a take on Ralph Lauren’s polo player, but with a tomahawk instead of a polo stick.
“Sometimes the work is subliminal, with double and triple meanings,” he said.
While Arviso’s work still has a subversive, rebellious quality, he’s focusing more on joy these days than anger.
“The collection that I’m bringing to the stage in a few weeks is a very bright and vibrant one,” Arviso said. “I’m taking it back to the mid-’90s when I was really into East Coast hip-hop, and I was going to these underground warehouse raves in downtown Phoenix.”
Margaret Roach Wheeler Chickasaw, Choctaw
In conjunction with Bear Robe’s Native Fashion Week, the gallery Zane Bennett Contemporary Art is presenting an exhibition that gallery director Carina Evangelista calls a “mini retrospective” of work by Indigenous fiber artist Margaret Roach Wheeler.
Wheeler, who was born in 1943, founded the first tribally owned textile company in the United States, Mahota Textiles, in 1984, naming it after her great-great-great-grandmother who was forcibly removed from Mississippi to Indian Territory in 1844.
Wheeler’s new exhibition, titled “Summer Winter,” includes hand-woven garments from her acclaimed “Spirit Animals” series, which incorporate narrative elements from Chickasaw stories about owls, crows, bears, wolves and other animal guides. Wheeler considers them wearable art.
“I’ve always been interested in nature and animals,” Wheeler said, “and Native Americans always have spirit animals.”
As a child of four, Wheeler loved exploring the woods of Montana with her brother, who used to tell her that elves and fairies lived in the base of the trees.
“I spent hours in the woods making up stories, looking at things, playing with acorns and dirt and making mud pies,” she said. “And that influenced me. I know when I did my graduate research, I recreated that tree. It was an environment that you walk into and you went into the base of the tree. I had a mattress in there and a big weaving on the back wall, which was my imaginative interpretation of what was inside of that tree.”
At the same time that she was exploring nature, Wheeler was also seeing Works Progress Administration murals by Indigenous artists, which is partly what inspired her to become an artist. By junior high, she was already painting and selling original works of art.
Wheeler has retained close ties to the natural world throughout her career, not only through her animal imagery but also in terms of her materials. And Evangelista has highlighted this aspect of her practice by including a shelf of Wheeler’s hand-dyed yarns.
“She has been foraging the mushrooms, the elm bark and the lichen with which she dyes her yarn,” Evangelista said.
Wheeler turned to weaving in the mid-1970s while in grad school at Pittsburg State University.
“A lot of my friends, when I turned to weaving, told me I was crazy,” she said. “They said it was a craft, and it wasn’t going anywhere.”
Since then, Wheeler has witnessed a sea change in the art world’s attitudes toward textile and fiber-based art, as well as the fashion world’s growing appreciation of Indigenous art. Wheeler’s work has been exhibited at top-tier institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
