‘It’s a way to connect with them’: Dene Couture’s Tishna Marlowe on the past and future of Indigenous fashion

Fashion and costume designer Tishna Marlowe, credits her grandmother, Madeline, and great-grandmother, Marie Casaway (all members of Łutsël K'é Dene First Nation) for teaching her the foundations of sewing and beadwork. Born and raised in Łutsël K'é (Place of Small Fish), a community on the East Arm of Tu Nedhé (Great Slave Lake) in the Northwest Territories of Canada, Tishna was surrounded by female Dënesųłı̨né (Chipewyan) makers. She commends her grandmothers’ expertise as Dënesųłı̨né seamstresses and beaders; her great-grandmother Marie scraped tanned hides and beaded into her 80s. (“She saw tepees to cell phones,” Tishna says.) This strong Dënesųłı̨né matrilineal line continues with Tishna’s independent fashion brand, Dene Couture.

“My beading and my art are all about promoting my matriarchs,” Tishna explains. “Everything I do, even if they have passed on, is always about them. It’s a way to connect with them.” 

Etthén Dene (People of the Caribou) was Dene Couture’s collection at the 2024 Indigenous Fashion Arts Festival (IFAF) in Toronto. The collection showed how Dene land, culture, and women are intertwined through Tishna’s chosen medium of semi-formal and formal women’s attire. A close analysis of one of the gowns that debuted at IFAF titled Theda, a reference to the spiritual heart of Thaidene Nëné (the homeland of the Łutsël K’é Dene) named Ts’ąkuı Theda, reveals Tishna’s ability to call for action and tell stories through apparel making and runways. 

“For me, my art form isn’t just about ‘Hey look at me, I’m a designer,’ it’s about preservation of culture, of my people,” says Tishna. “We are Chipewyans, Etthén Dene, people of the caribou. And we’ve been following the caribou in the harsh subarctic environment since time immemorial.”

To highlight the ever-changing nature of Dene style and underscore caribou as the foundation of Dene fashion histories, Tishna constructed Theda from smoked-tanned caribou hide. The silhouette is a sleeveless hide hybrid of a sheath dress and tie-back dress with a long slip of shiny brown tulle beneath the hide. The sides and hems of the hide are ornamented with fringe, a typical element of Dene hide clothing. 

For Theda, Tishna tufted the caribou chin hair as well as hand stitched the antler slices, plant seed beads, and sheefish scales and vertebrae into floral designs. When the model descended down the runway, she wore dark chocolate brown platform stilettos, matching brown satin gloves, and a tanned-hide necklace and earrings made by Tishna. It was the epitome of Dene Couture—a combination of influences ranging from the Indigenous glamazon, Madeline Marlowe and Marie Casaway’s teachings, reverence for French luxury fashion houses, and the plants as well as animals of Thaidene Nëné.

Tishna is based in Calgary, Alberta, and travels back to Łutsël K'é—including driving more than one thousand miles from Calgary to Yellowknife and then a flight or boat ride—to visit family and gather or trade materials for her practice. For Theda, the material harvesting process was extremely collaborative, fostering relationality between First Nation people themselves as well as the people and the land. 

Theda consists of two caribou hides. An unnamed family in Cold Lake, Alberta, hunted, harvested, and ate the caribous. Then, Victor Tssessaze (Northlands Denesuline First Nation) and his mother-in-law smoke-tanned the hides. The Dene method does not use chemicals typically used in industrial tanning. Tishna follows Dene garment histories, both pre- and post- settler contact, of constructing custom clothing, or couture clothing, from tanned hides. 

“Indigenous women are the backbone of Indigenous fashions,” Tishna has shared. “Each teepee and cabin is a house of couture.”

Post settler-contact, Dene makers created and continue to create garments from hides inspired by Western garment designs, ranging widely in form. To adorn Theda with floral designs, Tishna stitched organic materials instead of glass beads. European settlers introduced glass beads and Tishna as well as other Dene artists frequently use them in their practices to create florals; Tishna's grandmothers taught her to bead with them. Before glass beads, Dene makers used organic elements, notably from animals that also provided sustenance. Drawing on this history, for the florals on the front of Theda, various family and community members alongside Tishna harvested materials from caribou, sheefish, and plants.

Indigenous fashion scholar Shawkay Ottmann (Fishing Lake First Nation) reminds us that in Indigenous dress theory there is a constant and reciprocal spiritual transfer of energy between materials from the land and the wearer through close physical contact. The land-based materials and floral motifs of Theda energetically and visually link the land to the human wearer. “These overlapping environments continuously exchange energy from each other, causing dress to possess something of the wearer as well,” Ottmann writes, “Clothing is not just presenting an identity, but encourages living in a good and respectful way.”

Ongoing processes of colonialism disrupted and continue to disrupt Indigenous couture-making. Tishna is keenly aware of colonialism’s impact in her community and uses couture to storytell and spread messages. Theda and its runway presentation was not a plea to return to Dene attire from the past, but a call to incorporate elements of Dene culture—including ethical subsistence hunting and sustainable animal-based fashion—into contemporary Indigenous fashion and life. 

For centuries, the Canadian government’s assimilation policies have threatened Dene lifeways, including hunting caribou. Climate change and natural-resource extraction also threaten caribou hunting. Today’s fast-fashion landscape is saturated with garments made from petrochemicals. Theda offers an alternative—a handmade, sustainable garment made in relationality with family and First Nations community that spiritually connects the wearer to the materials as well as the places where the materials were harvested: Thaidene Nëné, Cold Lake, and Calgary.

Tishna began sewing at age five and has been making mukluks ever since. When she had children, she expanded her practice; she wanted moss bags as well as baby straps and her grandmother encouraged her to sew them herself. A major catalyst in her trajectory as a fashion designer occurred in 2013, when she made her first couture outfit and won first place in a wearable arts competition at the Centre for Creative Arts in Grande Prairie, Alberta. The six-piece, glass beaded floral ensemble was made from materials available to Dene on the trapline: black stroud (a wool trade cloth introduced to Dene during the fur trade), trimmed muskrat fur, and glass beads gifted to her by her grandmother and mother-in-law. 

Since then, Tishna has continually built on the momentum of her success, making her own patterns, couture garments, and beaded jewelry as well as accessories. Her beadwork is a combination of her own designs, research of older Dene designs, and replications of her grandmothers’ designs. In 2015 she assembled a dress from traditional smoke-tanned moose hide with floral glass beadwork, titled Granddaughter of 1,000 Ancestors. Each floral design represents one of her family generations, referencing her matrilineal making lineage, and acknowledges moose as an important food source for Dene.

Through her couture practice, Tishna brings attention to critical histories of First Nations people in Canada. She designed a red dress collection to bring attention to May 5 as the National Day of Awareness and Remembrance for Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two Spirit people (MMIWG2S), also known as Red Dress Day. In a similar vein for National Day for Truth and Reconciliation or “Orange Shirt Day” on September 30 in Canada, she made an orange t-dress with archival photographs of Indigenous children from the Northwest Territories in residential schools to honor children who did not survive or were impacted by the residential school system, including members of her own family.

Tishna’s refined garment construction skills, Indigenous futurism, and advocacy for Indigenous language revitalization came together in her most recent collection titled Dene Yati (Chipewyan Language). Debuted at the 2025 Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week (VIFW), the men’s and women’s formalwear collection featured Dënesųłı̨né space-age clothing with appliqued Dene Yati in both the syllabary and alphabet. According to Tishna, the collection is based in the future, the year 3010, when she imagines that everyone has had to leave Earth and lives on spaceships. While this scenario may seem unbelievable, Tishna is drawing on histories of Łutsël K'é Dene First Nation surviving epidemics, the residential school system, and urbanization. “So how do you preserve a culture with no material culture and no land?” she asks.

The answer is language. Tishna’s first language was Dene Yati, yet she has little recollection of it and is currently relearning. “Without language you have no culture,” Tishna said. Dene Yati (Chipewyan Language) is a call for language preservation. This call starts at the local level of Łutsël K'é, to broader Dene people, and then to the global movement of Indigenous language revitalization.

The Native fashion space has connected Tishna to other female Indigenous designers, a call back to the Dënesųłı̨né makers of Łutsël K'é. Yet, Tishna acknowledges that Indigenous fashion is much more visible now than it was when she was growing up: “We are in the midst of an Indigenous renaissance,” she says. 

Amid this renaissance, how can independent Indigenous designers, like Tishna, make their work accessible to wider audiences? And with increased accessibility, how can garments be quality, long-lasting, and sustainably-made—which is especially important as Indigenous philosophies call on us to be in relation with and protect the land? For Dene Couture’s Dene Yati (Chipewyan Language) collection, Tishna utilized thrifted high-end upholstery fabrics—perhaps an urban Indigenous “hunting and gathering” technique for sustainably acquiring materials.

These questions are further complicated by the element of incorporating land-based materials, which nurture relationality and are quintessential to the energetic exchange described by Indigenous dress theory, yet can be expensive due to the required amount of time and skillset to harvest and process these materials. For example, as raw materials, traditional smoke-tanned moose and caribou hides cost thousands of dollars. And for Granddaughter of 1,000 Ancestors made from moose hide, Tishna spent 500 hours constructing the gown, which is also reflected in its price point. “It’s hard to sell clothes in an ethical way… [consumers] want a beautiful dress that is not going to cost them.” she remarked and also noted that perhaps that dress might be suited for a museum collection instead of an individual client.

Looking toward the future, Tishna remains committed to making couture garments and one-of-a-kind accessories. She said, “I will always make the couture line, because that’s my language, like that is the only way I know how to express myself 100% confident.” But Tishna is also interested in ready-to-wear to expand her clientele. For Dene Couture, ready-to-wear would be Tishna’s own designs, sublimated or digitally printed on quality fabrics that she would then sew from her own patterns into standard sizes. 

Continuing her grandmothers’ legacies, Tishna hopes to open a private atelier and sewing school to sell her work and teach other Native women how to make their own clothing, including garments that are emblematic of intertribal indigeneity like Pendleton coats. For Tishna, fashion is artistic expression, a mode of visual communication, and also a connector—bringing people to the land, one another, and culture. While these connections face disruptions, they are not completely severed. Through Dene Couture, Tishna stitches them together, one garment at a time.