Going Native? - Pendleton and Opening Ceremony

There's a lot good to say about Pendleton Woolen Mills. They're a family owned company and their clothes are made in the U.S.A. Their distinct styles and patterns are easily recognized. If you've own a Pendleton garment, you know that their stuff is very well made. As a vegan, I don't buy wool products, but I have a few old Pendleton shirts and flannels that I really like. I doubt that a woolen mill will ever make a cotton or synthetic line, but we vegans can dream, right Pendleton?

In any case, Pendleton has recently done some interesting collaborations with Levis and with Opening Ceremony, both of which accentuate Pendleton's famous Native American style prints. Some of it looks pretty cool, some is a little too busy for my taste.  Looking at these lines, particularly the Opening Ceremony collaboration, I started wondering if the patterns were authentically Native American or if Native American people had any stake in clothes designed to express or imitate their traditional patterns. Put a different way, I wondered if is it problematic to have a major purveyor of a style modeled upon Native American culture designing clothes and accessories for a market (rich hipsters) that excludes many Native Americans?

I started researching Pendleton's relationship with Native Americans and I found a couple of great articles on the Pendleton collaborations by Native American scholars who study Native American fashions. Here are their posts - Native Appropriations' piece "Let's Talk About Pendleton" and Beyond Buckskin's "Pay No Attention to the Man Beneath the Indian Blanket" both acknowledge that the relationship between Pendleton and Native Americans is traditionally positive, but they find it problematic when Pendleton uses Native American designs to produce very high-end fashions marketed to non-Native people and unaffordable to many Native Americans. Read their posts. Neither is what I would call radical - both are very thoughtful and revealing.