"Native Fashion Now" installation viewPeabody Essex Museum
Between 2015–2017, the Peabody Essex Museum mounted Native Fashion Now, the nationally-touring, first-of-its-kind exhibition to celebrate the visual range, creative expression and political nuance of Native American fashion.
Nearly 100 works spanning the last 50 years explored the vitality of Native fashion designers and artists from pioneering Native style-makers to today's maverick designers making their mark in today's world of fashion.
"Native Fashion Now" installation viewPeabody Essex Museum
Featuring contemporary garments, accessories, and footwear spanning a variety of genres and materials, these Native fashion designers traverse cross-cultural boundaries between creative expressions and cultural borrowing.
From one of Patricia Michaels' (Taos Pueblo) finale ensembles from the reality television series Project Runway to Jamie Okuma's (Luiseño/Shoshone-Bannock) dramatically beaded Christian Louboutin boots and innovative works made from mylar, vinyl and stainless steel, Native Fashion Now underscores Native concepts of dress and beauty, which are inextricably bound to identity and tradition in a rapidly changing world.
Mylar dresses. Stainless-steel boas. Iridescent-leather bomber jackets with a futuristic vibe. Stunning clothes and accessories you’ll find on the runway, in museum collections, and on the street. Welcome to Native American fashion and the contemporary designers from the United States and Canada who create it! They are pushing beyond buckskin fringe and feathers to produce an impressive range of new looks.
"Native Fashion Now" installation viewPeabody Essex Museum
In this exhibition you’ll find the cutting edge in dialogue with the time-honored. Some Native designers work with high-tech fabric, while others favor natural materials.
Innovative methods of construction blend with techniques handed down in Native communities for countless generations. Mind-bending works such as a dress made of cedar bark—a reinvention of Northwest Coast basket weaving—appear alongside T-shirts bearing controversial messages.
"Native Fashion Now" installation viewPeabody Essex Museum
This wearable art covers considerable ground: the long tradition of Native cultural expression, the artists’ contemporary experience and aesthetic ambition, and fashion as a multifaceted creative domain.
Native Fashion Now groups designers according to four approaches we consider important. Pathbreakers have broken ground with their new visions of Native fashion. Revisitors refresh, renew, and expand on tradition, and Activators merge street wear with personal style and activism. Get ready for the Provocateurs—their conceptual experiments expand the boundaries of what fashion can be. So let’s get started! Native fashion design awaits you, ready to surprise and inspire.
The story continues in Native Fashion Now: Part II.
Karen Kramer, The Stuart W. and Elizabeth F. Pratt Curator of Native American and Oceanic Art and Culture
Elisabeth Auffant, Administrative Coordinator for Curatorial Operations, Peabody Essex Museum
Marta Fodor, Rights and Reproductions Coordinator, Peabody Essex Museum
