Naiomi Glasses's Ralph Lauren Collab Is All About 'Indigenous Excellence'
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Naiomi Glasses’s connection to Ralph Lauren goes back years. When she was a kid, the seventh-generation Diné (Najavo) textile artist’s mother dressed her in the brand. When she was a teenager making trips from Dinétah (Navajo Nation) to Phoenix, she’d stop by RL’s store in the city to search through the assortment of vintage native jewelry in hopes of finding something to add to her own collection.
“I would go around looking at the cases and say, ‘Oh, these pieces are so beautiful,’” she says. “And I would think, ‘It would be so cool to one day curate the pieces that go in here.’ But that's as far as that dreaming went.”
Until, that is, Glasses decided to turn her love of weaving—fostered in large part by her late grandmother, Nellie—into a full-time gig. Her “business-minded” parents wanted to be sure that she’d be able to support herself as an artist, she says. “They were like, ‘You can't really make a living if you do weaving how Grandma did, where you take in one weaving a month to the trading posts.’”
She told them she’d do design work—extend the enterprise to floor rugs, blankets, maybe even clothing. So, they asked her to make a list of potential clothing brands she’d want to work with. “At the top of the list was Ralph Lauren,” Glasses says, laughing a little at the memory.
There is, indeed, something funny about hearing this story when you consider the context. Glasses and I are in the brand’s New York headquarters, standing in front of an artfully arranged display of clothing and accessories in shades of tan, beige, and brown and punctuated by splashes of red. There are chunky pullovers and embroidered jeans. Jacquard jackets and belted cardigans. A western shirt embellished with turquoise-tinted snaps. They feature Spider Woman and four-directional crosses. Saltillo diamonds. Wedge weave motifs. Some are made from undyed sheep’s wool. These are hallmarks of Navajo weaving in general and of Glasses’s work specifically. And that’s because all of them were created in a collaboration between Polo Ralph Lauren and Glasses, RL’s very first Artist in Residence.
The endeavor began more than two years ago, when the Ralph Lauren team reached out to Glasses to let her know that they were considering working with her. She was excited, but wary of getting her hopes up. “A lot of times these companies, they come up with a proposal and then don't follow through,” she says. Not so this time around. Within months, a contract was drawn up. Then Glasses was flying to New York to meet the design team—the first of many trips supplemented by near-constant Zoom calls. “I was deeply embedded within those design teams, able to tell them little nuances that I wanted in there,” she says.
The result was an overabundance of ideas. “When I was doing the design process with their in-house illustrator, we were just coming up with designs, designs, designs,” Glasses says. “I was like, ‘I want to see this, I want to see this.’ It's a dream come true, so I'm going to throw out every idea that I can think of.” In the end, by her count, they’d created more than 200 designs.
After winnowing that down to 60 or so favorites and realizing that they still had a lot of options on their hands, the team decided to split things up into three releases. The first arrived this week, with the second and third to follow in spring and fall of 2024, respectively.
“It feels like my own weaving journey,” Glasses says of the progression from the first to the third release. “Because I started weaving with neutrals first. Then I worked my way into working with bright colors, which is going to be the next drop. And then I really fell in love with the color blue and indigos, the different shades of indigos that you can get. So that's going to be the third collection.”
The project is a big step for a young artist—Glasses is only 26—but for an established brand like Ralph Lauren, too. The company has long been inspired by the motifs in Navajo weaving, “and I think it’s incredible to see exactly how it can go from something as dull as inspiration and then be born into something that’s as beautiful as a collaboration,” Glasses says. “To see the bright colors and to see it from an indigenous person’s perspective of what they see their designs as.”
The campaign that accompanies the first collection’s release is an extension of that perspective, one that Glasses says “highlights the indigenous excellence behind the scenes and in front of the camera.” Photos were shot by Ryan RedCorn (Osage) and Daryn Sells (Diné/Navajo), with behind-the-scenes video from Lonnie Begaye (Diné/Navajo). Shaandiin Tome (Diné/Navajo) created an accompanying short film. And the cast features indigenous models as well as Glasses and her family.
“It's been beautiful seeing it come together. And I'm really excited to see what doors this will open for other indigenous artists after me,” Glasses says. “Because as indigenous people, we're all going to lift each other up. And even with that, I wanted to uplift other artists along with me in this drop.”
Part of that effort, as it happens, brings everything back to Glasses’s teenage years and those days spent searching through the vintage native jewelry. As part of the campaign, she curated her own assortment of jewelry, sourcing handcrafted silver and turquoise pieces from six artisan families from the Navajo Nation, Hopi Pueblo, San Felipe Pueblo, and Zuni Pueblo. Select pieces will be available to purchase online and in stores. Call it a full-circle moment.
For Glasses, it’s rewarding—and a relief to finally go public with the project after all this time and effort. But it’s also still a little surreal. “There are moments where I just have to take it all in and be like, ‘That's your name right next to Ralph Lauren’s on the tag,’” she says. “It’s something dreams are made of, really.”
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