Adrienne Benjamin, a fashion designer from the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, won the SRGN Academy shoe design contest.
Adrienne Benjamin, a fashion designer from the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, won a prestigious shoe design competition in Los Angeles. Reporter Travis Zimmerman has more about the contest.
Travis Zimmerman: Adrienne Benjamin is well known for making jingle dresses and ribbon skirts in the Chiminising community of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. She’s been working with Minnetonka Moccasins, to help the company come to terms with its appropriation of Native clothing items, specifically moccasins. She recently attended a class at the SRGN Academy in Los Angeles, where participants can design their own shoes, and at the end of the class, people vote for their favorite shoe. Adrienne’s shoe was selected as the winning design. It was a dream come true for Adrienne.
Adrienne Benjamin: We’ve been watching this for like a very long time and just got inspired by it. You know, like I’ve tried over the years a couple different times to kind of get an initiative rolling behind that idea, and how cool it would be for kids. It just never happened.
And so I was like, you know what, like sometimes you just got to show people. And I wanted to do it for a really long time to go to one of those classes. I don’t know another time that I’m going to just invest in myself in that way. So, I did and I, I booked a seat in the class the LA, and I, I really at the time didn’t think about winning necessarily. I was just like so pumped to even be able to to do it.
My class was through the SRGN Academy, it’s called. The “Shoe Surgeon” is just an individual creative who started to do deconstruction and reconstruction of like common silhouettes of shoes and got noticed by a lot of people because he was doing really creative designs and honestly, I’ve been following that journey for like a long time, kind of before he even really hit it, like big and started making shoes for like NBA players.
TZ: The classes are for four days in Los Angeles, and come with a hefty price tag, but Adrienne showed where there is a will, there is a way.
AB: I don’t think that we come from a space where we often invest in ourselves like that. There was a saying that they said at the camp, and it sounds crazy, but it makes sense when you think about things on that kind of a scale. And it was like healthy, selfish, right? Like, how often do we give, give, give to other people and we don’t often invest in ourselves?
TZ: Once she got into the class, her sewing skills came in handy as she started to design a Nike Jordan shoe of her own.
AB: They have leather options. A whole program that you know shows you what Leathers they have in stock and then it shows you like the shoe silhouette and we could choose from a Dunk or a Jordan one and I, I chose a Jordan one. So the first day was just designing and cutting out, once you decided what leathers you wanted to use.
Whenever I make Jingle dresses or anything like that, I always kind of feel like that’s my strong suit when it comes to my art is I’m very good with color and the way that they go, things go together. So I wasn’t surprised that it looked good when I put it together. I was like, oh, that’s exciting. But I feel like I was one of the only people who went and kind of a one way color scheme. Everybody else had really different colors and an idea and I just rolled with it.
Then the second day was a lot of sewing. I had never sewn on an industrial machine prior, so that was new. But it was fun, a lot of the folks in the class were like, “hey, can you help me?” You know, like with the sewing stuff. It kind of changed my outlook on shoes, to be honest, like how much sewing and I did have an advantage.
TZ: The shoes designed by Adrienne and the other class participants were put up to be voted on and Adriennne’s shoe Misi-zaaga’igan, the Ojibwe word for Big Lake or Mille Lacs, won.
AB: You know, it was a huge outpouring of votes that my shoe got and that they were really, like, amazed at how many people actually voted. So that made me feel cool that, you know, like Indian country showed up for that and like all the the people on social media, whoever voted and like that just blew my mind and was really like humbling and just felt really thankful for that.
But like when you do get a spot in those kinds of spaces like, you just have to know that you know and know it’s you’re carrying more than just yourself. Like it’s you’re carrying your community with you too. So yeah, like, that’s all I can say is thank you. Like. Yeah, it’s very, like, emotional to think people voted for me.
TZ: Its just a matter of time before Adrienne’s shoe becomes available for purchase.
AB: It’s basically a one of one custom, right? It’ll be a limited run. I think it’ll be like a pre-order and everything will be straight off of their website.
TZ: For Minnesota Native News, this is Travis Zimmerman.
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