Donna Karan Does the North
NY Fashion Goddess Causes Stir in NWT

HighGrader Magazine January/February 2000
by Catherine Pigott
It started out as a low hum but soon the town was buzzing: New York designer Donna Karan had sent her top, global fashion-scout to Yellowknife. She was looking for northern stuff to buy and she was paying cash.
Bonnie Young, Donna Karan's global design director, was filmed by CBC North, fingering an exquisitely embroidered parka from Pangnirtung at a local gallery. "Some of the things we're going to put in our store and do a sort of gallery display, and some of the things are really for inspiration," she told the reporter. "Maybe we'll take some ideas and develop them into different things."
Young was on the phone to Glenn Wadsworth, manager of Yellowknife's Northern Images gallery, long before her early September visit. He rounded up sample parkas and northern contacts for her. She said she was looking for pieces to buy, he remembers.
"She also said to me she was looking at native images, especially from the Far North, because she thought it was an area whose clothing patterns and motifs weren't that known."
While Young remained somewhat vague about her intentions and appeared to contradict herself at times, Wadsworth says she was quite clear "they were looking at design motifs and elements that might be incorporated into their Fall 2000 Donna Karan collection."
Word that Dene and Inuit-inspired clothes could be hitting New York runways within the year has everyone, from part-time beaders to Inuit rights' groups, talking. Some see this as their ticket to the world of haute couture; international recognition at last for the craft of cultures little known outside of their home communities. Others fear that northern people stand to lose far more than they will ever gain from this kind of attention.
Karen Wright-Fraser is an aboriginal designer known for her elegant beadwork.
"Sure, we're flattered they want to use these designs and there might be some work for the designers and sewers here," she said, "but to me, it's like dangling a little carrot in front of us. They're saying, `You can bead this and you can bead that,' but they're still exploiting. They'll make millions off us and nothing will come back here. They should give recognition."
Karen didn't get to meet Bonnie Young, but other seamstresses and moccasin-makers were lining up to sell their wares to the young New Yorker. During her ten-day blitz through the Northwest Territories, Bonnie Young dropped in on Fort Simpson designer D'Arcy Moses, stopped in Fort Providence to inspect hand knit, rabbit skin sweaters and scoured Yellowknife for vintage parkas. She reportedly bought jackets right off people's backs for cash. We're talking major bingo money.
Young has travelled the world buying up traditional clothing and photographing indigenous folk in their regalia for her book Colours of the Vanishing Tribes. Karan herself penned the forward.
Worldly as she is, Young found some aspects of the North frustrating, according to Glenn Wadsworth. She was angry that she couldn't buy things wholesale from him and had trouble comprehending that a law banning the importation of seal products into the United States might apply to her. Young was a hit, though, in the traditional Inuvialuit community of Holman on the western edge of Victoria Island. Children at a drum dance crowded around her, transfixed. She snapped up stroud dancing parkas and a caribou skin parka.
"It was so old the hair was falling out of it," said a puzzled Margaret Kanayok, who works at the Holman Craft Co-op and served as Young's guide. "We wondered what she wanted with those old, raggedy clothes," she laughed. "She said it was for a fashion show or something, but she didn't really explain."
Those "old, raggedy clothes" ended up on sale at Donna Karan's newly opened flagship store on Madison Avenue in New York. Advance p.r. for the state-of-the-art temple to consumerism proclaimed, "Like the city that inspired it, DKNY's new home will be a constant encounter of new ideas, both for the consumer and the culturally curious."
The Arctic parkas jostled for attention alongside the DKNY collections, Ducati motorbikes and Blanche's Organic Juice and Energy Bar.
Company spokesperson Patti Cohen said the northern pieces sold out the first week they were on display in Vintage Corner. "There's a vintage craze in America right now. People want things that are one of a kind," she explained. The garment tags said the clothes were made in Northern Canada, she said, though it is unclear how homemade parkas made for personal use came to have such labels. "This is something we felt we were being very positive about. We were happy to sell something of theirs and give more recognition to them."
For Pauktuutit Inuit Women's Association, however, recognition was not enough. When the organization heard about Karan's foray north, they wasted no time declaring it "a high-profile example of an attempt at appropriation and exploitation." They made the statement at an international round table on intellectual property rights in Geneva.
Pauktuutit fears a powerhouse like Donna Karan could turn Inuit women into cut-rate piece workers, producing their traditional designs at Third World wages for a global market. Some worry a mutated version of the traditional hooded women's parka, the amauti, could appear on New York runways with no recognition for the women who have kept and used the design for millennia.
"The amauti should be protected. It's the intellectual property of all Inuit women," says Monica Ell, an Inuk designer, entrepreneur and Pauktuutit's vice-president. The group is using the Donna Karan visit to draw attention to their two-year battle to get the amauti legally protected as the cultural property of Inuit women.
Currently no law can stop Donna Karan or any other designer from using indigenous designs. There are only vague international covenants such as the Convention on Biological Diversity. It recognizes the value of traditional knowledge and the need to protect it, but lacks the force of law. Donna Karan, however, has been feeling the heat since Pauktuutit took its complaint to the international stage.
Spokesperson Patti Cohen has fielded journalists' calls from across Canada and Europe, including the BBC. She now insists the company has no plans to add northern touches to future collections.
"There are no intentions to use their designs," she said. "Donna Karan is probably the preeminent women's wear designer in the world and I don't think she's about to knock off somebody else's design."
Dene designer D'Arcy Moses sees this whole thing differently. He says Pauktuutit is being opportunistic in linking their cause to the Karan expedition. For the talented and ambitious Moses, having the incarnation of Donna Karan alight at his Fort Simpson shop was a kind of benediction. A frontier town at the scenic confluence of the Mackenzie and Liard Rivers, Simpson isn't known as a global fashion crossroads.
"Who in New York has ever heard of Dene culture? Everyone on the planet is aware of the Inuit, but the South Slave, nobody's heard of them," he says. "So for us to have this global-design director come up and show an interest in what we're doing, I think it's exciting."
Bonnie Young spent more than a thousand dollars in his shop on a moose-hide jacket, hunting bags and other crafts. There's a possible exclusive sweater deal in the works with Dene Fur Clouds in Fort Providence, where two sample rabbit fur sweaters knit to Karan's specifications have been sent out to New York.
"If they like them, we're hoping there will be a contract for ten sweaters for the February fashion shows and the Fall 2000 season," said Fur Clouds manager Judy Magrum.
As a small Dene-owned company "we just don't have the resources to get our merchandise there," Moses says. "Here's an opportunity where we can expose Dene culture to as sophisticated an audience as New Yorkers, who otherwise wouldn't know we exist."
Moses says he would be concerned if DKNY ripped off Dene designs and mass-marketed exact replicas without giving the original creators any recognition. "That's not what is happening here," he says.
He points to the work of other designers who have taken "inspiration" from native design, such as Gucci with his beaded pumps and jeans, and John Galliano's American Indian-inspired collection. These designers borrowed visually, Moses says, but what they did had nothing to do with the deeper spirituality or culture of aboriginal people.
Pauktuutit has sent Donna Karan a letter asking about her intentions and arguing that designs such as the amauti belong to aboriginal women. So far, there has been no response. Patti Cohen says northern garments are no longer on display at the steel, glass and concrete mega-boutique in New York. "We're on to spring now."
As this article is being written, the peripatetic Bonnie Young is in India, presumably working on another chapter of her book on the world's vanishing tribes.

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