Fashion Week hosts Haida designer

Dorothy Grant's brave, new world of fashionAfter 20 years as a Haida fashion designer, Dorothy Grant is changing her stripes. One of the first to apply Haida designs to clothing, Grant has always been an innovative classic--taking traditional designs and applying them in traditional ways to classically designed clothing. She shied away from high-fashion trends.

It worked for her, giving her an international clientele and shows in museums, including the influential Smithsonian in New York, where she was honoured this month as one of five contemporary native fashion artists.

"It is truly an honour because these are old traditional pieces, but they are opening up this exhibition here to designers or artists who have kept with tradition but moved forward in a contemporary way," she said from New York.

But high fashion is calling her.

An opportunity to show her designs in New York during Fashion Week in fall 2009, has her conceptualizing a whole new way of stylizing.

"This is a really exciting project for me because it is sort of catapulting us into mainstream," she says. "We will be designing things for spring 2010 and we are very buzzed about that. We will be designing some really different things."