AT VANCOUVER ART GALLERY’S massive Fashion Fictions exhibit, some of North America’s most cutting-edge Indigenous designs stand side-by-side with Jun Takahashi’s intricate honeycomb-pleated skirts, Ronald van der Kemp’s swirling chain-link cascade of textile waste, and Rick Owens’s elaborate sculptural puffer capes.

That should not come as a surprise, as contributing curator Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, of Alberta’s Siksika Nation, says: “This is the original couture.”

What’s significant is that the exhibit’s complex creations by Indigenous designers like Caroline Monnet, Jamie Okuma, and Catherine Blackburn are not separated into a room of their own, but integrated into the larger themes of this expansive international survey of experimental design practices by the likes of Alexander McQueen, Issey Miyake, Moncler, Balmain, and Balenciaga.

“Fashion is much more important to me than just these pretty garments that have a season or that are in style,” says Bear Robe, an art historian and independent curator of Indigenous fashion-art shows at institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Native Art, and producer of the celebrated annual Indigenous fashion show for the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA). 

“Being Native is political, and that goes hand-in-hand with fashion, and that’s why I have this driving, urgent need to critically and academically look at that so it just doesn’t become a fad,” she explains. “When you look at the history of American fashion, or the records of Indigenous fashion, it’s a footnote, still relegated as a curiosity. The power of representation in all fields is so important. And so what I do now is an extension of my art curation and art history.”

Bear Robe has devoted her career to celebrating the intense technical skill of designers whose artistry is on a level with any French couture house.