Designer Taalrumiq uses both traditional materials, like seal skin, with machine-made material for her 3-D printed snow goggles.Courtesy Taalrumiq
At the Indigenous Fashion Arts Festival held at Toronto’s Eaton Centre, spectators attending the event’s scheduled runway shows on June 2 will notice something novel on Inuvialuk and Gwich’in designer Taalrumiq’s runway: 3-D printed versions of the snow goggles that are traditionally worn by folks from Inuit communities.
Historically, this practical eyewear has been crafted by hand from materials like animal bone and driftwood. But Taalrumiq, who is currently participating in a residency program at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, will showcase styles made with plastic filament or UV resin. The pieces definitively possess a sleek high-fashion aesthetic that’s expected on catwalks, while delivering functionality – the narrow slits for looking through are shaped so as to eliminate the sun’s glare during the period in which northern regions experience 24-hours of daylight. For Taalrumiq, the opportunity to merge her interest in fashion design, technology, and preserving and promoting Inuit cultures is hugely appealing.
Taalrumiq initially embarked on her artistic practice of designing and making garments and accessories through combining “traditional materials,” such as seal skin and furs with machine-made items like beads, sequins and fabrics with metallic finishes. “I’m creating new, exciting versions of my traditional clothing,” she says, adding that some of her earliest memories are of sewing with her mother.
The impulse to create these works is one Taalrqumiq believes she comes by hereditarily. “My family and the women in our community sewed for survival in the Arctic,” she says. “Every woman must have the sewing skills to properly clothe themselves and their families. I believe these talents for sewing and working with furs and skins is inherent. I’m just tapping into blood memory.”
With her snow goggle designs, Taalrumiq is also tapping into her educational background in career and technology studies at the University of Alberta. It was during her studies there that she was able to minor in art and take fashion design classes. “I’m a lifelong learner,” she says. “It’s really interesting to see how fast technology changes, and how I’m able to incorporate it into my sewing practice.”
The theme of Taalrumiq’s proposal for the Banff residency program was digital embellishments, and thus included her wish to take advantage of the centre’s high-tech tools. “I wanted to use their equipment to recreate some of the material items from my own cultures,” she says. 3-D printing also affords her the ability to further innovate on ingenious ideas like the snow goggles’ key element-fending characteristic.
“When you’re in the design stage,” she says of the goggles’ printing process, “you can adjust many aspects – like how thick or wide the shape is, or what the size of the slits will be.” Here, Taalrumiq points out the differences between the two types of materials used in her designs, which she embellishes with adornments like glitter-finish lambskin, gold deerskin and rivets fabricated from cubic zirconia and shotgun shells.
“The filament printed ones are super lightweight,” she says, adding that the filament also produces a textural, linear surface design that contrasts with the resin’s smoother surface. “The resin-printed goggles feel and look like bone goggles. They’re a bit heavier – and more brittle, too. I learned that when I accidentally dropped a pair and I wanted to cry. But it’s part of the learning process.”
Taalrumiq additionally extols 3-D printing for its low cost – digitally made items can be created for only a few dollars depending on how they’re printed. This fact has made the proposition of equipping remote Indigenous communities with such technology one of note; a 2018 paper by academic researchers Svetlana Obydenkova, Nicholas Anzalone and Joshua Pearce shows the promise of “the use of a low-cost open-source 3-D printer (RepRap) capable of fused filament fabrication to reduce operating costs for nomadic reindeer herder groups.”
For Taalrumiq, there’s another exciting dimension to this technological adoption in terms of accessibility that could benefit those living far from the tundra, and it makes being able to feature her eyewear during the forthcoming IFA Festival particularly meaningful.
“A big part of why I look to our traditional clothing and incorporate my contemporary design ideas is because I want our youth to see our culture and think it’s cool – so they can feel seen and represented,” she says. “I didn’t really have that growing up. There was a lot of shame around my identity, and it took me well into adulthood to reclaim and be proud of these aspects of my identity. If I can help anyone to feel that cultural pride and strengthen their own identities in some way through my designs, then I’m really honoured by that.”