Back when she was a fashion-design student, Suzette Soloman had a moment of cultural inspiration. The Haida, Scottish, and Lebanese designer sewed a Native sun symbol onto the front of a dress. “The Green Millennium” was the theme of the fashion show she designed the dress for, at Kwantlen University College. Students were instructed to take recycled garments and create new clothes out of them. In other words, this wasn’t the usual place to display marketable gear.

“After the show, people kept coming up to me and they wanted to buy the dress,” Soloman told the Georgia Straight at her studio across from Oppenheimer Park. “I was blown away. I thought, ‘Wow. Maybe I’ve got something here.’ ”

That was five years ago. Since then, Soloman has graduated, built a business called Gwaii Urban Wear (www.gwaiiwear.com/ ), and launched a line of funky, First Nations–inspired casual clothing for the fall 2008 season. L’Oréal Fashion Week picked up on her promise and included her line in Toronto in March. Coast Salish–Kwakiutl designer Pam Baker has taken Soloman under her haute couture wing. And the Tale’awtxw Aboriginal Capital Corporation, which supports aboriginal businesses in the Coast Salish territories, gave her a loan with a 40-percent grant portion.

With so much out-of-the-woodwork support, Soloman wants to know why more First Nations youth aren’t designing First Nations–themed lines. She was, as far as she knows, the first Native student to take fashion design and technology at Kwantlen. (The school’s name means “tireless runner” in Halkomelem.)

“I couldn’t believe it [the market] hadn’t been tapped yet,” she said. “There’s so much potential.…To me, it’s a no-brainer. It’s an easy sell.”

Soloman is one of just a few First Nations clothing designers in the province. Haida designer Dorothy Grant, who sells under her own name; Baker, whose collection is called Touch of Culture; and Cree-French designer Denise Brillon of Artifaax are among the handful that have made it onto the radar.

Stylistically speaking, Soloman’s collection falls between Artifaax’s screen-printed hoodies and leather cuffs, and Grant’s and Baker’s couture. A signature piece is her dark denim miniskirt with Haida-style frogs in running stitch on the pockets. She’s also releasing a knee-length jersey-knit dress made of burgundy viscose and spandex, with eagles on two hip pockets. Already, she said, the Hudson’s Bay Company has expressed interest in carrying her line.

While Soloman is full of promise, the mainstreaming of aboriginal style has a dark history in this province. The Cowichan sweater tells the story well, according to Sylvia Olsen, who lives in the Tsartlip First Nation community near Victoria. The sweater is a lifelong love of hers, providing the subject for her master’s thesis, a National Film Board documentary, a children’s book (Yetsa’s Sweater), and a book she is writing on the sweater’s history. Olsen is nonaboriginal but married a Salish man, and her children are fifth-generation Cowichan knitters.

“Starting in midcentury, before the polar fleece was around, they were the outerwear of the West Coast,” she told the Straight in a phone interview from Ottawa. The bulky-knit, undyed, grey-wool sweaters with two bands of repeating patterns had their fashion heyday, she found, from the 1950s to the 1970s. The sweaters became so popular internationally that they were replicated by companies as far away as New Zealand, Olsen said. Their popularity was a compliment, she noted, but practically speaking it meant foreign-made sweaters were selling alongside authentic sweaters in local stores. For the Salish, it led to the registering of a certification mark for the sweaters, signifying the fact that a true Cowichan sweater has no seams, is made from hand-spun wool, and is knitted by a Coast Salish person. Despite such specific guidelines, the trademark failed to protect the sweaters from copiers, Olsen said. The process also created an unexpected result.

“Cowichan sweaters became etched in historical stone,” she said. “They did not follow fashion.”

Nonaboriginal designers evolved them, though. Calvin Klein, Olsen recalled, made a beautiful Cowichan-inspired sweater out of silk and mohair. Last year, the Gap made a line of stylish Cowichan-looking sweaters. So did Vancouver-based retailer Aritzia, whose sweaters are closer-fitting than the originals, and are wildly popular. None of those tributes have directly benefited “real” Cowichan knitters, though.

What can designers and consumers learn from the Cowichan experience? Olsen suggests that young First Nations designers must push traditional designs forward to keep them relevant—just as Soloman is doing. And fusion is essential, she said.

In recent years, moccasins, mukluks, parkas, the traditional Métis fringed leather jacket, and other “traditional” First Nations items have been replicated by non-Native manufacturers. To Soloman, this is a tragedy.

“I don’t agree with it at all,” she said. “Why do white people think they can take our culture away from us and make money on it? It’s the one thing we have that we’re proud of.”

Through her collection, Soloman is doing her part. And undoubtedly, when Gwaii Urban Wear releases its collection this fall, it will be a coup in a new era of authentic First Nations design in Canada.