For Native American designer Dante Biss-Grayson (Osage), taking up space at New York Fashion Week earlier this month was an opportunity to show attendees beside the catwalk and beyond that Natives are “still here.”
“We’re taking up space where, normally, a lot of Native designers haven’t been. So I want to get out there and show them how it’s done,” he tells In The Know by Yahoo. “We’re Native, and we can keep up with the big fashion houses.”
Biss-Grayson launched his fashion house, Sky-Eagle Collection, in 2019 in Taos, N.M. His designs mix traditional Native clothing, such as ribbon skirts, with an avant-garde sensibility. Whether it’s adding vibrant pops of color, lace overlays or even raising the hemlines, Biss-Grayson is creating modern Native fashion that is competing on a global stage.
“The designs, the details, are based out of Osage ribbon work,” says Biss-Grayson, who is the brand’s founder and lead designer. His wife, Yanti, is the premier of the fashion house, while their 4-year-old daughter is in the process of learning the family business. “I kind of took that idea, the concept of the linear structure of the lines, and really made it modern and blew it up.”
The new warriors
The main theme for Sky-Eagle Collection is empowerment, he adds. “For me, that means the new warriors — men, women, whomever — walking in the modern world, who still want to hold on to their tradition, their culture.”
The Osage Nation citizen knows a lot about the warrior mentality as a veteran of multiple overseas tours, including stints in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I returned home, with many traumatic incidents locked deep inside my heart and soul,” Biss-Grayson writes on his website. “I needed a release, I needed therapy, so I opened my art and fashion studios as a way to heal. I paint, write poetry, sculpt, create art installations, and I am a Fashion Designer.”
While his experience was harrowing, he was able to use that to inform his…
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