For generations, the mainstream fashion industry treated Indigenous design as a mood board: patterns without people, “inspiration” without permission, and culture stripped of context. The designers in this countdown are changing that relationship. They are building labels, directing collaborations, entering museum collections, showing work internationally, and creating opportunities that keep authorship where it belongs.
This is not a scorecard of Indigenous identity or cultural importance. It is a curated countdown of ten contemporary designers whose work is expanding what fashion can look like when Indigenous people control the story, the business, and the runway.
10. Evan Ducharme: Métis history in a sharply contemporary silhouette
Evan Ducharme is a Métis designer from St. Ambroise, Manitoba, in Treaty 1 territory. Their work brings ancestral and contemporary Michif knowledge into conversation with gender, queerness, place, and the politics of who gets seen.
Ducharme’s clothing has appeared in major arts institutions, including the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Seattle Art Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibition In America: A Lexicon of Fashion. The achievement matters, but so does the approach: Métis design is not treated as frozen heritage. It is alive, questioning, elegant, and fully part of the contemporary fashion world.
9. Amy Denet Deal: Upcycling as community work
Diné designer Amy Denet Deal founded 4KINSHIP around slow fashion, reclaimed materials, and Indigenous storytelling. Her path included years in the mainstream fashion industry before reconnecting with her Diné heritage and building a brand rooted in land and kinship.
What makes 4KINSHIP especially compelling is the way fashion extends into direct community action. The label’s work has supported projects such as the Diné Skate Garden, creating space for Navajo youth to gather and create. Here, a jacket or upcycled garment is not simply a product. It is part of a larger model in which design can circulate resources, confidence, and visibility back into community.
8. Angela DeMontigny: Making “Indigenous luxury” visible
Cree and Métis designer Angela DeMontigny has spent decades challenging narrow expectations of what Indigenous fashion is allowed to be. Known for carefully worked leather, suede, beadwork, and cutwork, she describes her practice through the language of contemporary Indigenous luxury.
DeMontigny has presented collections in Canada and internationally, including at South Africa Fashion Week and London Fashion Week. The point is bigger than access to prestigious stages. Her work insists that Indigenous-made luxury can be modern, urban, sensual, and commercially ambitious while remaining accountable to the designer’s own identity and creative decisions.
7. Orlando Dugi: Diné couture built one detail at a time
Orlando Dugi, a Diné designer from the Navajo Nation, is known for eveningwear with the patient intensity of fine art. Hand embroidery, beadwork, dramatic surface detail, and precise construction turn his garments into pieces that reward a closer look.
Dugi has shown at Native fashion events and New York presentations, bringing an unmistakably personal couture vision to audiences far beyond the Southwest. Rather than letting the industry reduce Native design to a recurring print or seasonal trend, he works through material, labour, and silhouette. His clothing makes a quiet but forceful argument: couture excellence and Diné authorship belong in the same sentence.
6. Justin Jacob Louis: Streetwear that speaks Cree
Justin Jacob Louis is a member of Samson Cree Nation from Nipisihkopahk in Treaty 6 territory and the founder and creative director of SECTION 35. His streetwear and menswear draw from nêhiyaw culture, language, land, and the visual world of contemporary city life.
SECTION 35 has appeared at Indigenous Fashion Arts, the White Milano trade show during Milan Fashion Week, and The Met’s In America: A Lexicon of Fashion. Collaborations with Roots and other established brands have widened its reach. Yet the label’s power comes from its center: it tells Cree stories without translating them into a generic “Native-inspired” aesthetic for outside approval.
Jamie Okuma is an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians and also identifies with Shoshone-Bannock, Wailaki, and Okinawan heritage. Her practice crosses fashion and fine art, moving between ready-to-wear, intricately beaded work, footwear, and objects collected by major museums.
In 2023, Okuma joined the Council of Fashion Designers of America; the CFDA later identified her as its first Indigenous member. That milestone matters because it recognizes both creative excellence and professional authority. Okuma’s work refuses the old division between “craft” and “fashion.” Whether encountered in a museum or worn on the street, it carries the same precision, wit, and self-defined beauty.
4. Patricia Michaels: Taos Pueblo design on an international stage
Patricia Michaels is a citizen of Taos Pueblo and the designer behind PM Waterlily. Many viewers first met her as the runner-up on season 11 of Project Runway, where she became the program’s first Native American contestant. Her career, however, reaches far beyond television.
Michaels’ work draws from nature, movement, and her Taos Pueblo roots while resisting a single commercial formula. She has presented in the United States and internationally, opening doors for audiences who had rarely seen a Pueblo designer treated as a central fashion voice. The lasting achievement is not simply representation. It is the freedom to be experimental, theatrical, and unmistakably herself.
3. Lesley Hampton: Fashion that makes room for real bodies
Lesley Hampton is an Anishinaabe designer and member of Temagami First Nation whose label places body neutrality, mental wellness, and community at the heart of the work. Her collections have been presented during Toronto, London, and Milan fashion events, and her designs have been worn by Indigenous screen leaders including Lily Gladstone, Devery Jacobs, and Tantoo Cardinal.
Hampton’s influence is especially visible in who gets invited into the frame. Casting and styling become part of the message: Indigenous people and bodies marginalized by conventional fashion are not afterthoughts. They are the audience, the collaborators, and the stars. Her work shows that inclusion can be structurally built into a brand rather than added as a campaign slogan.
Naiomi Glasses is a seventh-generation Diné textile artist and designer who learned weaving from her late grandmother, Nellie Glasses. As the inaugural artist in Ralph Lauren’s Artist in Residence program, she worked directly with the company’s design teams to translate her original woven art into a multiseason collection.
The Polo Ralph Lauren x Naiomi Glasses collaboration was significant because it publicly centered the artist, her family, Dinétah, and the origins of the designs. Glasses also curated work by Native jewellery artists for the project. It offered a model, still imperfect and worth watching, for what can happen when a global brand moves from borrowing Indigenous aesthetics toward collaboration, credit, and material benefit.
1. Bethany Yellowtail: Building a fashion platform bigger than one label
Bethany Yellowtail is a member of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and comes from the Mighty Few District of the Crow Nation. After beginning her career in the corporate fashion world, she founded B.Yellowtail in 2015 to create clothing rooted in her own community, values, and creative authority.
Her impact reaches beyond the B.Yellowtail label. Through The Collective, her company has created a marketplace for Native American, First Nations, and Indigenous artists and entrepreneurs. Yellowtail has also used fashion to support women, youth, and efforts addressing missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. She leads this countdown because she demonstrates what sovereignty in fashion can become: not just being seen by the industry, but building an Indigenous-led ecosystem with room for many people to succeed.
These ten designers do not share one aesthetic, one Nation, or one definition of success. That difference is the point. Indigenous fashion is not a single look. It includes streetwear, couture, museum-quality beadwork, body-neutral eveningwear, sustainable upcycling, gender-expansive tailoring, and major commercial collaboration.
The most important change is who controls the process. When Indigenous designers own the label, name the influences, choose the collaborators, and decide how cultural knowledge enters the work, fashion moves from extraction toward relationship.
Which designer are you excited to follow, wear, or support? Share this list, then visit the designers’ own platforms to learn directly from their work.
