On August 11-13, 2026, I presented my Canadian Fashion Economies research “Fashioning Canada: Dress, Commodity Flows, and the Material Politics of Canadian Identity” at the Interrogating Canadian Identities / Les identités canadienne — une interrogation (ICI) 2026 Conference. August 11-13, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, York University,

Fashioning Canada: Dress, Commodity Flows, and the Material Politics of Canadian Identity

This conference presentation examines Canadian identity through dress, arguing that clothing and textiles have actively participated in shaping the social, economic, and political worlds through which Canada emerged. Drawing on research from Canadian Fashion Economies (Bloomsbury, 2025), it uses an object-based methodology to investigate how garments acquire cultural and national meanings as they circulate through economies, communities, and historical narratives.

Through objects including the Chilkat dancing blanket, beaver felt top hat, Hudson’s Bay blanket coat, patchwork quilt, eighteenth-century garments and wardrobe records, and the Indigenous ribbon skirt, the paper traces the interconnected histories of First Nations material cultures, colonial expansion, global commodity exchange, women’s labour, consumer aspiration, and nationalism. Particular attention is given to the ways imported materials were adapted, re-authored, and incorporated into local practices rather than simply imitated.

The paper introduces the concept of sartorial nationalism to describe the capacity of dress to stabilize and circulate images of the nation while also obscuring the complex Indigenous, colonial, and transnational histories from which those images emerged. Ultimately, it argues that Canadian fashion history belongs at the centre of Canadian history. Dress offers an unusually intimate archive through which large historical structures: colonialism, commerce, gender, labour, cultural continuity, and national identity, can be encountered at the scale of the body.

Bear with Young, Chilkat blanket, object no. 16.1/869. Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, New York. Courtesy of the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History.

https://www.yorku.ca/laps/research/ici/2026-conference

The conference talk is here:

Canadian Fashion Economies is available from Bloomsbury:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/canadian-fashion-economies-9781350357372