What Happens When Heritage Craft Meets Global Ambition

Drive 75 minutes northeast of San Diego’s tony La Jolla neighbourhood, and beachy vistas transform into the verdant Palomar Mountain, where luxury gives way to reservation land — a different kind of richness.

There, on the La Jolla Indian Reservation, Jamie Okuma works alone in her home studio, hand-beading museum-quality pieces that can take months to complete. The Luiseño and Shoshone-Bannock designer became the first Native American inducted into the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2023, a distinction that brought new visibility — and new questions. At a showcase in New York this summer, the press asked about her production team.

“Just my family’s shoulders to cry on,” she said.

Five thousand miles away in London, Akosua Afriyie-Kumi has a different answer to the same question. Her brand Aaks works with a women’s cooperative in northern Ghana, where each handwoven raffia bag takes a week to complete. While she has 20 women doing the work, material shortages pose a different challenge. Gold mining in southern Ghana has decimated raffia supply.

“We used to get 100 bushels per order,” said Afriyie-Kumi. “Now we get 10.”

Whether it’s labour, materials or money, designers working with traditional and sustainable materials are continually faced with shortages, and forced to confront the same reality: Fashion’s infrastructure wasn’t built for them.

Today, the industry’s supply chains assume speed and volume, its financing models require scale and its material sourcing depends on extraction. When gold mining devastates Ghana’s raffia supply and sustainable fabric minimums cost $12,000 per colour, the barriers aren’t just financial — they’re structural.

“I work with biomaterials and a lot of them have a minimum of 200 to 300 meters per colour,” said New York-based designer Mónica Santos Gil of Santos. At $18 to $40 per meter, a single colour can cost up to $12,000. “We still haven’t been able to produce at scale for a single colour because I don’t want to risk having unsold inventory just sitting there.”

To access sustainable materials, brands need to produce a greater amount of their product. But creating that volume requires capital that small brands don’t have — a catch-22 that keeps these traditional fashion brands perpetually small. Fashion can celebrate Indigenous design and sustainable innovation, but its economic logic makes both nearly impossible to scale.

The gap between rhetoric and reality hasn’t gone unnoticed.

“These larger brands create a few products from sustainable materials and then claim the entire brand is sustainable,” said Carolina K, founder of an ethical lifestyle brand working with artisans across Latin America.

Some designers are finding workarounds within the constraints. Social media has allowed them to reach collectors willing to pay premium prices without traditional retail markups.

“People can see and they can make up their own mind and it’s a personal connection,” Okuma said.

The pandemic accelerated another shift: Zoom fittings expanded Thai Nguyen Atelier‘s customer base beyond founder Thai Nguyen’s local California market to clients nationwide who want bespoke work. Rhiannon Griego — a mixed Tohono O’odham, Mexican and Spanish textile artist in Santa Fe creating woven textile designs inspired by inherited traditions — relies on loyal, patient collectors who purchase from her across different bodies of work. Thematic series like her recent “Embers” collection, whose 42 pieces took 10 months to complete, explore the metaphor of rekindling dying fires.

“It’s slow going. … It takes time for the work to find its home,” she said.

But these solutions only work for designers content to remain small — and for customers who can afford to wait.

The Obstacles They Face

The irony isn’t lost on Indigenous designers: As governments apologise for historical extraction, new examples accelerate.

In October 2024, then-President Joe Biden apologised to Indian boarding school survivors, who were forcibly removed from their homes and forced to assimilate into white American society. The next day, the Bureau of Land Management greenlit the Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron Project, which would allow for mining on federal BLM lands 60 miles from seven nearby Paiute tribes, increasing the likelihood of poisoning local waterways and threatening endangered plants with boron (a chemical compound found in the environment and many foods), which serves as a flame retardant and improves colour vibrancy in luxury fabrics."

Meanwhile in Ghana, mining gold to create luxury handbag hardware touted as “responsibly sourced,” is often made from illegal, small-scale operations known as “galamsey,” costing $2.3 billion per year in lost revenue and polluting 60 percent of Ghana’s fresh water with deadly chemicals, according to think tank Wilson Center. Similarly, Congolese cobalt production, which powers smartphones and produces “cobalt blue” dyes appearing in high-end fashion has surged 150 percent, from 2020 to 2024, devastating river ecosystems, polluting drinking water and causing reproductive health crises including miscarriages and birth defects in mining communities, reports the NGO Business and Human Rights Centre.

Across these continents and territories, the materials behind luxury fashion are inseparable from Indigenous displacement, ecological loss and colonial legacies.

Designers who want to scale face impossible choices. Griego hand-weaves each piece using traditional materials like agave and yucca fibres that have become harder to source since the Santa Cruz River was diverted to supply Tucson and Phoenix. A single fine art piece takes her two weeks of 14-hour days to produce.

“Investing in community, finding a designer that has the ability to train a team within their community or fellow Indigenous makers who are skilled and who are hungry to share and create something really powerful together … that financial resource and community would be the most important way for Native designers to grow sustainably,” she said.

She’s considered scaling production by working with Indigenous weavers in Mexico, but she’s wary due to language barriers and fearing the loss of textural irregularity — what she calls “the spirit of imperfection.”

Finding the right producers, too, creates another constraint. Thai Nguyen Atelier operates studios in both California and Vietnam, splitting production across continents, but Nguyen’s seamstresses are aging, and younger generations lack patience for such detailed work.

“A lot of my beading and embroidery [is] done in Vietnam, because we can’t even find people to do that here,” said Nguyen.

Unable to find skilled workers locally, he established a second studio in Vietnam with fewer than five people, where traditional embroidery and beading techniques are still practiced. But even there, he worries about the future.

“The younger generation in Vietnam [is] not really into the whole making thing. They just want everything done and finished,” he said.

Oftentimes, the brands that scale fastest are those willing to trust distant suppliers. But that compromise can defeat the purpose for designers whose entire model depends on knowing exactly who made what and how.

Thrive, Not Survive

These designers are working to find compromises they feel won’t ask them to sacrifice their — or their work’s — integrity, but need industry cooperation to do so.

Flexible minimums from suppliers, for one, can make a major difference. Santos, for example, is beginning to engage with corn starch material producers to lower costs of production and order minimums — as can patient investors that don’t demand exponential growth, as well as environmental policies that protect Indigenous material source rather than accelerating extraction. Infrastructure investment on reservations — internet access, shipping logistics, workforce training — could address geographic barriers that Okuma described as a hurdle in recruiting skilled workers.

Consumer education, too, remains critical, helping shoppers to rethink value.

“Price reflects fair wages, ethical practices, innovative biomaterials which may cost more upfront, but I see it as a long-term investment,” Santos Gil argued at Climate Week in September.

Larger brands could play a role through partnerships, like Ralph Lauren’s Artist in Residence programme with Diné weaver Naiomi Glasses, but they must be equitable, not extractive. Past collaborations, like that of non-Native Canadian designer Chloë Angus, often pay flat fees while brands profit from designers’ cultural capital. In practice, equitable programmes involve things like profit-sharing on collections, funding training programs on reservations, launching Native fashion college scholarships or supporting material conversation efforts.

“Investing in community, finding designers who can train teams within their communities, that financial resource would be number one,” said Griego. “Really [spotlight] Indigenous makers not because it’s trendy. We’ve been here all along.”

Still, not all see scale as the ultimate goal. In fact, some have deliberately chosen to stay small, rejecting fashion’s growth imperative entirely. Okuma, for instance, is hesitant about outsourcing her intricate beadwork.

“I can’t imagine putting that on somebody else,” she said. She also faces competing pressures from her community: Employing non-Native workers draws criticism, but paying Native artisans fairly for such time-intensive work would make her pieces prohibitively expensive.

That’s perhaps the most fundamental shift of all — that some clothing is meant to take weeks to create, cost more and exist in smaller quantities. The current system measures success by growth and reach. For designers working with traditional materials and ethical practices, success might mean staying exactly the same size, indefinitely.