Anishinaabe designer apologizes after MMIWG-themed dress prompts online outrage

Screenshot of critical online post featuring an Anishinaabe and Mohawk fashion designer's dress, which used imagery of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people. The designer has since apologized saying she never intended the piece to be triggering. (Courtesy of Deborah Green, Lesley Hampton)

SASKATOON — Anishinaabe and Mohawk fashion designer Lesley Hampton is apologizing after a dress featured in 2019 that used imagery of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people recently sparked outrage online. She said she never intended the piece to be triggering but instead, give the missing and murdered a spotlight in a traditionally white-dominated world of fashion.

A photo of the eponymous Indigenous-owned fashion brand’s red-spotted, cream-coloured dress was recently reposted by the Cree model who wore it two years ago for a photoshoot. Critics online said the dress was triggering because the red spots resembled blood.

In an email, Hampton told CTVNews.ca that definitely wasn’t her intention and that the colours were only meant to symbolize the thousands of women whose lives were cut short or who never came home.

“I’m so sorry that this wearable artwork was triggering,” she said. “Those feelings are completely valid and I’m disappointed in myself that I didn’t see those possible triggers in my work prior to releasing it. This critique allows me to grow as an artist and develop better work in the future.”

One particularly critical post on Facebook garnered dozens of comments and shares and accused Cree model Ashley Callingbull and the brand of exploiting the iconography of MMIWG2S+ for the sake of fashion.

“Posing sexy is NOT the way to honor the cause,” Cree activist Deborah Green wrote online. “In fact, it further perpetuates sexualization of Indigenous women, and reinforces the colonization of our bodies as disposable and open to predators.”

The picture is from a 2019 photoshoot from Lesley Hampton’s Eighteen Seventy Six fashion line. The show was considered groundbreaking at the time for featuring only Indigenous models and centring the issue of MMIWG2S+.

But seeing the photos recently “immediately triggered and traumatized” Green, a Calgary-based Indigenous activist and organizer for the Calgary Sisters In Spirit marches.

“The dress itself, had it not been attached to the MMIW fight, would’ve been a fine dress and Ashley could’ve posed how she wanted,” Green, whose own sister, Laney Ewenin, was murdered in 1982, told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview.

Hampton told CTVNews.ca that, at the time, she didn’t have Indigenous voices she could lean on to flag any blind spots in her work – something that has greatly changed over the past two years.

Green said had Hampton consulted more families like hers, connected to the MMIWG2S+ movement, they would’ve urged the designer not to have had the model pose suggestively.

Green’s rationale behind that is that far too many Indigenous women are sexualized without their consent.

“As women, I feel like we have a right to dress how we want and shouldn’t be subject to stereotyping and being targeted by predators for how we choose to dress. But that not is the case in this country – we are being targeted as prey.”

Callingbull, the first Indigenous woman to win the Mrs. Universe contest in 2015, said the last thing she wanted to do was upset people when she reposted the photo of the dress online.

“It’s a difficult situation, because obviously I feel terribly if it triggered the families, who are really hurting. Even me, I have family and friends who’ve gone through the same thing,” she told CTVNews.ca during a phone interview on Wednesday.

Hampton told CTVNews.ca the dress, which was never sold, showcased at her debut at Toronto Fashion Week two years ago and she wanted to send a message.

“We chose to include this messaging in this collection as we believed there was a lack of awareness of Indigenous issues in the mainstream fashion industry,” she explained, saying MMIWG2S is absolutely a part of those issues.

Callingbull, who has posted about MMIWG2S in the past, as recently as last week, said the collection at the time forced the traditionally white world of fashion to see “how many women are gone.“

She said it “opened a lot of people’s eyes, especially non-Indigenous people’s” and because there was a message behind it, “it wasn’t just putting on something in the name of fashion.”

“It’s supposed to be art… it was a statement dress,” she said, noting the message might not resonate with everyone.

Green said Callingbull likely didn’t intend on triggering or offending anyone, but that it could’ve been avoided had more discussion taken place.

“Yes, everybody is entitled to their opinions but at what expense? For me to cry and go back to the memories of my sister being murdered? For my friends to see their mothers’ blood splattered on the wall because of her imagery?” Green said. “It wasn’t her intent, but this is the result of it.”

“I’m disappointed by a lot of Indigenous people today, including Ashley, being from the Indigenous community, particularly if they have family or friends that they’ve lost,” she said.

Green said “the respectful way” to honour the women would have been finding some way to incorporate all of their names instead of symbolism resembling blood.

She hopes the designer takes in the criticism and that a full apology would include removing the photos and ensuring they are not reposted again.