Dorothy Grant: An Endless Thread

Review By Laura J. Allen

March 19, 2025

In 2010, scholar Jessica Metcalfe featured the trailblazing Haida designer Dorothy Grant in her seminal PhD thesis on Native fashion, noting that “Native fashion designers in the Northwest Coast region deserve further research.” Dorothy Grant: An Endless Thread is a joyously written, designed, and illustrated book that significantly contributes to this deserving art and design history. The volume bills itself as “part look-book, part memoir, and part history,” and delivers. Between a sweeping new photo shoot of Grant’s work and the plethora of personal stories and historical context from contributors and the designer herself, the book provides long-needed documentation of Grant’s major impact on Haida art and on fashion more broadly alongside the people she holds dear. I closed the book feeling exhilarated.

The book was developed and published in conjunction with the 2024–2025 retrospective exhibition Dorothy Grant: Raven Comes Full Circle at the Haida Gwaii Museum at Ḵay ‘Llnagaay. The Museum’s director Taa.uu ’Yuuwans Nika Collison introduces the volume, including the significance of wearing a Dorothy Grant piece on her wedding day. Several sections follow, all with wonderful photographs from the 1980s and 1990s that testify to the audacity and extent of Grant’s accomplishments. Sdahl Ḵ’awaas Lucy Bell offers a historical overview of Haida dress and fashion, locating Grant in a líis, or ancestral thread, of design and innovation from her forebears—the thematic core of the book. India Rael Young discusses Grant as a vanguard, including her opening of her boutique in downtown Vancouver’s Sinclair Centre in 1994. The next section is especially invaluable, where the designer takes the reader outfit by outfit through her oeuvre, offering sketches and detailed memories that explain her intentions and journey—important insights to comprehend her work. Following this, Grant’s longtime assistant Kwiaahwah Jones describes her experience as well as meaningful relationships among Grant’s colleagues, clients, and illustrious figures who have worn her work. Finally, besides the typical acknowledgements, endnotes, and bibliography, the book includes a helpful chronology and an abbreviated catalog raisonné that locates all of Grant’s works that are in museum collections, further aiding future research and exhibition.

Throughout, images shot in 2023 by photographer Farah Nosh show Grant’s pieces in exuberant embodiment. The clothes are modeled by Haidas and other friends of all ages on Haida Gwaii and in Coast Salish territory, sometimes with Grant attending and featured. The photographs convey a palpable sense of community while visually recontextualizing Grant’s work. Collectively, they allow the viewer to appreciate the durable coherence of Grant’s design principles: for example, her sensitivity to aesthetic balance on the body, to positive and negative space, and to her discerning use of bold, declarative surfaces such as the shawl collar—and to notice when the designer has pushed herself.

The book’s writing well testifies to the mettle of this entrepreneur in a field where success, however one defines it, can be hard won. That said, the text and images do not offer too much to contextualize Grant alongside other Native fashion designers across her career, even with few in relation. I also wish that Young’s compelling point of the linkages between Native political power and Grant’s fashion was more elaborated upon throughout the book. But these aspects were not the project’s intentions. Grant has long warranted such a fine compendium of her talent, hard work, and prodigious output since she first sewed a button robe in 1981. Given that the work of male carvers and painters on the Northwest Coast has been prioritized so often for lavish exhibitions and catalogues, Dorothy Grant: An Endless Thread offers an equalizing and energizing presentation of one of the region’s most important artists.