From Up Here's October issue, here are more of photographer Hannah Eden's shots from the fashion feature and few words from the creative minds behind the looks:
Model Danielle Mager wears a hand-dyed canvas, fish scale and bone detailed gown from Six Red Beads along with ulu earrings, and mammoth ivory and Northern lights rings from Dan Wade Jewelry.
Six Red Beads
The Designer: Tishna Marlowe
The Place: Lutsel K’e, NWT and Grande Prairie, Alberta
The Story: My business is called Six Red Beads because when I was going to university my professor wanted to know: how do I connect with my culture while living in mainstream society? So I wrote a paper called “The journey of the six red beads.” And it was about how beads ended up in my culture, how beads physically ended up in Lutsel K’e. So this paper had to do with the slave trade, and the Hundred Years’ War, and the beaver industry. Anyhow, I came across a ledger that said my great grandfather’s name, and it said woman, X, but she wouldn’t have went to the post without him. It was my great grandmother who traded one beaver pelt for six red beads. It was a Hudson’s Bay transaction. So everything I do now, it comes to me. Like you guys coming to me. I just go with the flow.
I had the privilege of knowing my great grandma who died over 100. She lived in a place with no electricity or running water and she had it all, the three layers of granny nylons. She was so blind I had to go over there and thread her needles. She’d reward me with bannock and jam, or sugar cubes and tea.
Dan Wade Jewellery
The Designer: Dan Wade
The Place: Nunavut
The Story: I used to work at a gift store, DJ’s Sensations. I worked in the back and I’d see all these carvings and jewellery coming in and say wow that’s amazing, that’s so beautiful. I wanted to know how they made something so amazing. Then sometimes they’d bring something so ugly and scraggly that I thought, I could do something better and I don’t even know how to carve!
So no carvers would really show me their ways because of the added competition, and the only college class was a jewellery and metalwork class that had some painting and ceramics and some carving at the very end of it. I applied and I’ve been loving it ever since.
On how he got his hands on mammoth for the mammoth ring: George Roberts, he’s a knifemaker from the Yukon, had a box of mammoth scraps. He needs bigger pieces to do his work but his scraps were all the perfect size for me to use with my jewellery. So I asked someone to pick it up for me from the Yukon.
