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If the dress were to hit stores today, people would be up in arms about Mizrahi's "riffing," just as they were about Jeremy Scott's totem pole designs for Adidas. But, Kramer notes, when Naomi Campbell wore the piece on the cover of Time, Michaels "saw a part of herself in this dress, accepted by mainstream America. She saw Native American culture accepted by mainstream fashion and for her, it opened the doors into the fashion world and it gave her inspiration to become a designer."
Where is the line drawn? Is there ever an appropriate way for non-Native people to draw inspiration from Native culture? Native American designers and academics agree it's important to make sure the Native community is benefiting in some real, tangible manner whenever its culture is invoked.
Kim TallBear, an associate professor of Native studies at the University of Alberta, says, at minimum, "something must be returned to the Native community. If you want to use a Native resource or design, you better be giving back to them in some way or another because you are taking what is not yours."
"Part of the trouble is that some Native American communities are very impoverished," says Green. "At the same time, you have huge amounts of money being made by people appropriating what's theirs."
Green cites Ralph Lauren, which knocked off Cowichan knits — and labeled them as Cowichan without any involvement from the tribe — just a year after it put out a catalog full of sepia-toned images featuring Native Americans as veritable props. "What Ralph Lauren could have done was to ask Cowichan women to knit those sweaters and to compensate them fairly," she says. "Then they could have called the sweaters Cowichan and they would have been! There are plenty of Cowichan women who knit for a living. They should have worked with them."
She points to a brand like Pendleton, which has been supplying Native Americans with blankets and garments for over 100 years. The brand has maintained a reciprocal relationship with Native tribes by trading with them and involving them in the design process.