Column: Fashion designers often steal from Native culture too

Fashion has long had its way with Native American totems — the weathered profile of male elders, the striking patterns created by Navajo weavers, the romance of teepees and feather war bonnets. The borrowing and stealing from Native Americans is often done with blithe disregard for propriety, because there is a misguided belief that “there aren’t any of them left — that they are a thing of the past that can be idealized,” says Jane Blocker, a professor at the University of Minnesota who specializes in contemporary art.

Outsiders have shown a particular affection for feather headdresses, celebrating them for their beauty, employing them to connote exoticism and reveling in their connection to the natural world. At the same time, vigilant and exasperated guardians of Native American culture have repeatedly explained that the headdress is sacred to them. Not in the past, but right now. Not just anyone is allowed to wear one and, most certainly, a barely dressed model prancing down a high-fashion runway is not one of the chosen few.

And yet modern music festivals abound with self-declared bohemians bedecked in feather headdresses. They became so ubiquitous that one Canadian festival banned them. The list of offenders also includes members of the fashion establishment, big and small: Victoria’s Secret star Karlie Kloss, workaday models walking a runway in New Zealand and organizers of a Fashion’s Night Out event in Los Angeles. Pharrell Williams was taken to task for wearing a war bonnet in an Elle UK fashion shoot. All of them were pressed into an apology with the paternalistic scold: You should know better.