On the weekend of Red Dress Day, May 5, a Cree-Métis woman is holding a two-day Indigenous fashion festival in Kamloops, B.C., with designers each creating a red dress to raise awareness of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit-plus people (MMIWG2S+).
Kim Coltman has worked in the fashion industry since 1972, when she got her start as a model. She now uses the knowledge she’s gained to run Fashion Speaks International (FSI), a Tk̓emlúps (Kamloops)-based organization she started in 2015.
FSI’s Revolutions Red Dress Fashion Festival is set to run this Saturday and Sunday in the Northside Hangar at the Kamloops Airport.
The show will feature nine designers, according to the event website, all of whom Coltman said were tasked with designing a red dress for the show’s May 5 finale.
The Revolutions event will showcase collections from designers including Shannon Kilroy, Sierra William, Elizabeth Spike, and Arthur Paul. The event will also feature performances by the Cultural Ballet and Dannicka Kequahtooway as well as vendor tables.
What is Red Dress Day?
Red Dress Day is held annually on May 5, the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and Two-Spirited People.
It was inspired in 2010 by Jamie Black, a Métis artist based in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Black hung hundreds of empty red dresses in public places to represent missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and to bring awareness to the issue.
In a YouTube interview with Smithsonian, Black said the idea was to confront people with the violence that women are experiencing, and to create a space for women to tell their stories.
Now, versions of the event are held in communities across Canada.
Raising awareness through fashion
Coltman’s own past keeps MMIWG2S+ at the front of her mind and drives her ambition in the fashion industry. Coltman recalls her experience of being abducted, and how lucky she was to escape.
“I don’t see myself as a survivor anymore. I now see myself as a thriver because I’m out there and I’m doing and I’m helping other people,” she said.
“So my goal became to build a coalition of fashion industry professionals that all wanted to use their voice for the same purpose.”
FSI was born after organizing a one-off fashion show in 2015, but Coltman says the public response was so strong she knew that she had to continue doing more.
“The primary focus was, and has remained, raising awareness about … MMIWG2S,” according to FSI’s website.
The website also notes that FSI works with “other grassroots organizations who work directly with the families of MMIWG2S,” as well as various community members impacted by the MMIWG2S+ crisis.
While in Cannes for a previous show, Coltman said they had pictures of MMIWG2S+ lining the runway. She believes that the international shows are important to bring awareness to the ongoing MMIWG2S+ crisis in Canada.
“For me, being able to do shows abroad, where we can bring images of our missing and show them to the world while we’re there is super, super important,” she said.
“So in promoting [the designers] while we’re promoting or talking about missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people, has allowed us to open up conversations that we normally would never have with people from all over the world.”
Coltman also incorporates Indigenous culture into each show she produces, with previous shows featuring an opening prayer and powwow dancers. At one show they were unable to smudge inside so everyone went outside and continued to pray and smudge together.
“People on the street were stopping and watching us and many of them held back and waited for us to finish so that they could ask us questions,” she said.
Susan Tatoosh with the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Society Centre says it took a long time for people to acknowledge Indigenous women, girls were going missing.
“We really do have more than just one topic that we want to discuss. And you know, that’s why I called my company Fashion Speaks — because it does and it can. And it can lead to healing and it can lead to the truth and it can lead to reconciliation and it can lead to the world.”
She noted how fashion can open doors for Indigenous people, and said the different aspects of resilience, artists’ talent, and community present in the fashion shows are all interconnected.
Those efforts to make connections saw a B.C. woman grace the catwalk at the Cannes Indigenous Arts and Fashion Festival last year.
Racheal Marie Billy, a member of the Cook’s Ferry Indian Band, a small First Nation located in the Spences Bridge area of B.C., came across a social media post by Coltman calling for models interested in doing a photo shoot for the annual Red Dress Campaign.
Billy ended up on the catwalk at the Cannes Indigenous Arts and Fashion Festival in the French Riviera resort city with famed director Martin Scorsese — who was in Cannes for the screening of his new movie Killers of the Flower Moon — in the audience.
Billy said she was honoured to bring Indigenous culture to Cannes.
“Just knowing that the area that we were in, and how many people that probably hadn’t known much about our culture or what we do or what we look like or anything like that, I felt proud,” she said. “I felt proud to be there.”
Coltman credits her grandmother as a role model in her perseverance and drive.
Although at a young age Coltman thought her grandmother’s need to hide their Indigenous heritage was out of shame, it was instead to keep their family safe, after having three of her four children taken to residential school. Her grandmother later retrieved them all and they were able to stay together, living in a small cabin.
“She really, really gave me a good solid foundation in terms of being able to follow through on commitments and to find a way to get it done, no matter what.”
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