Long before the runways of Paris and Milan defined what the world understood as fashion, Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island were already mastering the art, threading identity, ceremony, and cosmology into every stitch. Always in Fashion, a landmark new exhibition opening May 1, 2026, at the Textile Museum of Canada, doesn’t just acknowledge that history. It insists on it.
Curated by Amber-Dawn Bear Robe of Siksika Nation, the visionary founder and Executive Director of Native Fashion Week, the exhibition arrives as both a cultural reckoning and a celebration. Bear Robe has spent her career building infrastructure where Indigenous designers could move freely: on their own terms, in their own languages of cloth and beadwork and design philosophy. Always in Fashion is the fullest expression of that mission yet.
The exhibition gathers more than two dozen of the most compelling voices in Indigenous fashion and design, including Jeremy Arviso (Original Landlords), Dorothy Grant, Korina Emmerich (EMME Studios), Kent Monkman, Patricia Michaels, Lesley Hampton, Justin Jacob Louis, Alex Manitoypes (SACRD THNDR), Brian Jungen, and Qaulluq (Clara McConnell), among many others. Together, their work traces a through-line from ancestral knowledge to contemporary couture, not as a nostalgic exercise, but as an act of sovereignty.
What makes Bear Robe’s curatorial vision especially powerful is its unflinching honesty. Always in Fashion does not flatten the complexity of Indigenous fashion into a feel-good narrative. It holds space for internal community conversations around appropriation, the tensions between tradition and innovation, and what it truly means to reclaim a cultural narrative that has so often been taken without credit. These are the conversations happening in studios and at kitchen tables across Indian Country, and now, they take their rightful place in a museum.
The designers featured represent the full range of what Indigenous fashion can be: high-conceptual couture, sustainable design rooted in land-based knowledge, beadwork that functions as autobiography, and garments that are simultaneously protest and prayer. Each piece in the exhibition is a reminder that Indigenous aesthetics were never derivative; they were, and remain, a primary source.
Bear Robe’s work at Native Fashion Week has long operated at the intersection of Indigenous art practice, design, and community building. With Always in Fashion, she extends that project into the institutional space, not to seek validation from it, but to transform it.
The Opening Reception takes place Friday, May 1, from 5:30 to 7:30 PM at the Textile Museum of Canada. Light refreshments will be served. The museum extends its gratitude to TD Bank Group through the TD Ready Commitment for their support of this exhibition.
For those who have followed the rise of Indigenous fashion with the reverence it deserves, Always in Fashion is not simply an exhibition to attend. It is a moment to witness.
RSVP via the Textile Museum of Canada.
