PhD student draws from Ojibway roots to decolonize fashion
Working in the fashion industry, Riley Kucheran saw firsthand how wasteful the industry is.
Kucheran, who is Biigtigong Nishnaabeg from Ontario, thought about the exploitation of workers in developing countries to mass produce clothing for cheap prices.
Then, he thought about Indigenous clothing pre-contact — before it was mass produced or policed. He decided to explore the two subjects in his doctoral work.
"Indigenous fashion is so counter [to] what the mainstream fashion industry is about," Kucheran said.
Kucheran's work, shadowing Cree-Métis luxury designer Angela DeMontigny and studying the differences between the Western fashion industry and the Indigenous industry, earned him a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship.
The differences between the two industries are vast, Kucheran said. "It's so much based on relationships."
"[DeMontigny] knows everyone on that supply chain … she has very personal and intimate relationships with everyone who touches her products before they get to consumers," he explained.
"You just don't get that with the Western fashion industry."
The products aren't mass produced — but they're unique, Kucheran said. It'd be a throwback to how clothing was made pre-contact.
When kids were taken to residential school, traditional clothing was often stripped off them and burned, and the kids were given uniforms to wear instead. Kucheran said clothing was "literally used as a weapon."
"It's easier to control people when they all look the same," Kucheran said. "I think the images [of kids at residential school] are so striking when all the students are in the same uniform and you can barely even tell who's who.
"That was a very purposeful decision by the state, by the churches to kind of remove our identity through the removal of our clothing."
Changes in clothing also happened in less obvious ways, too. Kucheran has heard stories about how pre-contact, women would wear skirts in whatever length best suited their tasks — but after contact, when religious moralities were pressed on people, skirts got longer.
"If you're hiking in the woods or you're trekking through a swamp, it makes sense to have a shorter skirt — it's just logical," he said. "But because of those moralities and those values imposed on us, our clothing changed."
Kucheran's work will focus on solutions to rely less on mass-produced clothing — whether that's figuring out a solution to "fast fashion" or returning to how Indigenous people used to make clothing.
"I think, to some extent, we kind of lost that ability to clothe ourselves," he said. "I think decolonizing fashion would bring that back."