Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty - Arctic Fashion, Dec 2023

The West Greenlandic national dress represents one of many aspects of Greenlandic identity and culture and is being used in contemporary fashion designs. Young Greenlanders are branding themselves in the media through fashion and are proud to wear distinctive signs of ‘Greenlandicness’. However, the incorporation of ‘sacred’ and cultural symbols, such as elements from the national costume, into fashion statements is problematic. Public disputes for and against changes to the perceived traditional symbols will form the basis of the empirical analysis. Will changing elements within the culture imply an impure culture and a weaker Greenlandicness? Fashion seems to be an important platform for negotiating identity, as it makes room for mixing elements and for challenging the essential dichotomy of purity and impurity, instead of placing Greenlandic identity and culture in a straitjacket of normative perceptions of tradition, essence and reification.

The starting point for this article is The Living North project conducted by the non-governmental organization Arctic Art Institute in Arkhangelsk, Russia, in 2019–21. The project team digitized archives of the crafts factory, Belomorskie Uzory (‘The White Sea patterns’), for the first time and through art-based participatory research revealed the existing challenges of the industry, communicating marginalized knowledge and creating new social choreographies. The case of reviving tacit knowledge and re-creating narratives in the context of the hypercentralized knowledge production of Euro-Arctic Russia is discussed in the article. The rapid modernization of the first half of the twentieth century led to radical changes of everyday life, including the disappearance of tacit knowledge, erosion of memory and cultural identity of northerners. In 1968, during Khrushchev’s ‘ottepel’, a crafts factory Belomorskie Uzory opened in Arkhangelsk with the goal to document and restore decaying crafts and fashion design from Euro-Arctic Russia. In the article, I discuss the case of the factory in light of decolonial and ecofeminist theory with a particular focus on fashion. The project shows that art-based participatory research strategies stimulate dialogical relations between the factory and young fashion designers and artists, leading to the revitalization of communities in the North.

While a version of Icelandic heritage is exhibited in modern fashion, the imagery is a recent invention without specific historical context. Yet, centuries-old outfits with accompanying components that form the canon of Icelandic women’s national dress are well-established cultural elements. There are three categories of national dress that are instantly recognizable and have well-defined variations of national dress that figure more than ever in formal events and celebrations. However, these do not seem to be referenced in designers’ efforts to create distinctly Icelandic and Arctic imagery through fashionable clothing. Revealing how this appears and why may provide clues to what prompts similar disconnects in other Arctic communities and small-group cultures in which vivid national dress iconography is separated from fashionable apparel. We reveal this separation through fieldwork and interviews conducted in 2021 and 2022 in Reykjavík and online, a look at historical paths of national dress, an examination of cultural underpinnings and attitudes, and references to Jean Baudrillard’s theory on the evolution of symbols in society. We illustrate the gravitational pull of ritualistic contexts that effectively distance national dress from designed fashion. We follow the development of Iceland’s iconic ‘Lady of the Mountain’ and her dress, observing how their emergence and eventual fusing removed them and their symbolic presence from the day-to-day world of fashionable apparel.

This article presents and discusses the development of Iñupiat (North Alaskan Inuit) fashion of atikłuk (‘inner garment’) and atigi (‘outerwear’) over time, with a focus on adoption and adaptation, linked to the concept of cultural authentication. It is based on the author’s fieldwork in the winter of 1997 and the summer of 1998, which included participant observations and interviews with seamstresses from the Iñupiat villages of Kaktovik and Utqiaġvik at the North Slope of Alaska, literature reviews, observations from museums and archival photos. The second part of this article involves a case study that focuses on a young Iñupiat trans woman and her mother in 2022. Together they designed a new fabric (instead of leather) for an atikłuk. The case show how she adopts the contemporary Iñupiat garment and adapts it to her own style.

The article discusses the definition of ‘Arctic childhood’: how it affects the ideal of childhood in the Arctic countries while differentiating it from understandings of childhood in more temperate climates. Arctic childhood offers novel viewpoints to the concept of childhood. It grants agency to the non-human world: environment, weather and design solutions such as clothes and wearable technology. It also highlights how these shape the concept of childhood in the Arctic and beyond. The article focuses on wearable technology, which brings new legal issues to considerations of childhood in data-driven culture. The central argument is two-fold. As design solutions, wearable technology may preserve the ideal of the active child, essential to Arctic and Finnish childhoods. Legally, however, there are some issues: since wearable technology is designed to bring forth and share with others the vital functions of the child’s body, it raises concerns about children’s fundamental right to privacy and data protection. By bringing together fashion studies and the doctrinal study of law, and by using wearable technology as an example, the article argues that multidisciplinary approaches are needed when new technologies designed to track and monitor individuals are offered to minors in the name of staying healthy.