Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Indigenous fashion encompasses the aesthetic plurality of Indigenous material brilliance, innovation, and resilience.Because of this, Indigenous fashion cannot be singularly defined, nor should it be.Situated within this frame of thought, this article tells a story informed by the author's own relationship to Indigenous fashion practice within the context of Turtle Island (North America), alongside and in conversation with the words, ideas, and inquiries of decolonial and Indigenous fashion thinkers, makers, and dreamers.The article begins by critically engaging with the epistemological nature of fashion as a term and concept tied to settler-colonial power and capitalism.Subsequently, the paper discusses Indigenous fashion as a gift from spirit, as keeping our Ancestors' hands warm, and as wearing our homelands, alongside honouring the innovative qualities of Ancestor and grandmother fashion designers who laid the foundation of Indigenous fashion design theory and process.Identifying the ways in which Indigenous fashion embodies Indigenous epistemology, ontology, and cosmology, the article concludes by situating Indigenous fashion as a material bridge that re-stitches Indigenous bodies back to land.
Source: Fashion Studies
DOI: 10.38055/ufn050101
Author: Justine Woods
Institution: Toronto Metropolitan University
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411511649