Photo by Justin Louis. Instagram: @sweetloo35

What do the Chicago Blackhawks, Washington Redskins, and Cleveland Indians have in common? Sport and its continued appropriation of Indigenous culture.

Section 35, a B.C.-based apparel company, is pushing back. Founded by friends Justin Louis and Andrew Kazakoff, Section 35 tackles Indigenous stereotypes head-on with political statements people can wear.

“You can still create conversation with clothing, but in a way that people can enjoy wearing it,” says Louis, who is from the Samson Cree Nation in Alberta and is currently based in the Coast Salish Territory of Vancouver. While the designs themselves are conversation starters, so is the company’s name. “Section 35” alludes to the section in the Constitution Act of 1982 that protects Aboriginal treaty rights to land, fish, log, and hunt.

The company carries everything from leggings designed with portraits of Indigenous matriarchs to ball caps resembling the Red Sox logo replaced with red moccasins. Their most popular collection called “Kill Mascots, Save the People,” created in collaboration with Chicago-based artist Santiago X, brings awareness to Indigenous imagery that’s misrepresented and misused on sports teams’ jerseys.

Starting a clothing line was the last thing the two friends thought would happen when they first met playing baseball. As a descendant of Russian immigrants, Kazakoff believed in the message of inclusion that Louis hoped to spread.

Their message has since infiltrated pop culture, with members from A Tribe Called Red and Major Lazer sporting their designs.

But whether their designs are worn by celebrities or by Indigenous youth, Louis says he simply wants people to “be able to speak their truth a little bit and not be ashamed of who they are.”

More recently in the foreground of Jian Ghomeshi’s trial and his acquittal of all sexual assault charges, defence lawyer Marie Henein’s designer shoe collection, her “architectural-inspired” hair and courtroom attire were also heavily debated as deliberate choices on the part of arguably one of the most polarizing legal figures in our immediate collective memories. Were these clothing choices a foreshadowing of what would be her razor,-sharp dissecting courtroom strategy? Were the red bottoms of her Christian Louboutins meant to warn of the figurative bloodshed awaiting Lucy Decoutere on the stand?

Our clothing is a second skin, our social epidermis. Our chosen threads are by far one of the most powerful tools we use to convey our social selves, our feelings, beliefs, and our aspirations. Clothing can be rebellious, resistant; it can signify aggression and authority as well as it can embody assimilation and passivity. Intriguingly, that the same garment has the capacity of being all of these or none at all in different spaces and at different times. There is power in our clothes, how we perceive ourselves in them, and how others perceive us.

I have had items of clothing be my best friend at times—my ride-or-dies. I’ve mourned their passing when they are no longer wearable, when their seams had had enough. I’ve had clothing speak to and for me, help facilitate my confidence when I ran low in that department. Similarly, clothing can betray us. Nothing is worse than when a stranger has to inform you of an open zipper. Or, when clothes demand we take stock of our financial reality when a well-hidden price tag, the accomplice to a “wear and return” scheme, makes itself visible to those around us and a good Samaritan, unaware of the aforementioned deception, pulls the tag off and your stomach drops—your backstage is now your front stage and you are exposed.

Clothing, its meanings, and how we relate with it is complicated. Are we its hunter or its prey? Beyond its capitalist agenda, clothing choices, far from being a mere personal preference, are highly social, political, and filled with emotionality. In the end, we may wear our clothing but in what ways do our clothes wear us?

Photo: TXTILEcity

I take my hat off to the Textile Museum of Canada’s cool new project, TXTILEcity. Besides giving Torontonians a legit reason to walk down the street stuck to their smartphones, this interactive project uses Google map technology, and video and audio clips to relay the social, cultural, economic and artistic history behind Toronto’s textile and clothing industries.

The museum partnered with the digital arts non-profit Year Zero One and murmur Toronto for this self-directed walking tour of the city. If you’ve experienced murmur’s audio tours before, TXTILEcity works in a similar fashion. There are TXTILEcity signs posted throughout the city’s downtown core. When you see one, call the number and listen to an audio history of that location, its significance to the city and the textile industry. Or, if you are carrying a smart phone, there is an Apple- and Android-friendly app that provides the audio, plus video interviews and archival footage (or you can stay home in air conditioning and access everything from the website or YouTube, but that’s not as much fun as standing on Spadina listening to your own private history lesson).

The content ranges from discussions about Urban Outfitters and the gentrification of Queen Street West to Joe Mimran recalling the first Club Monaco, to the history of the Hudson Bay blanket. At the AGO, curator Michelle Jacques talks about the relationship between contemporary art and textiles through Germaine Koh’s Knitwork. The artist has been unraveling knitwear and re-knitting the yarn into a long, continuously growing worm-like entity since 1992.

But the history of workers rights and activism in the textile industry is the main thread of the tour. For instance, 483 Bay Street (by the Eaton’s Centre) is where the Eaton’s factory used to stand. The conditions were so deplorable that in 1912, 1,000 workers went on a three-month strike. Afterward, some of the organizers opened their own factories on Spadina, marking the beginning of the garment district as we know it today.

Just like the physical Textile Museum of Canada (if you haven’t been there in person, go!), TXTILEcity is an unsung gem, sharing stories and artifacts that otherwise would remain forgotten or ignored.