Victor Schwartz of New York City has spent the last 39 years building a business importing wine and spirits from small producers across the world. The tariffs are hitting his business hard. His customers want regional wines from around the world, so he can’t just shift to American vintages. And the state requires him to post prices a month in advance so it’s tough to keep up with Trump’s ever-changing tariffs.
More than 20 designers are presenting at the invitation of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts.Fashion plays a prominent part in Santa Fe’s renowned arts ecosystem, with Native American vendors each day selling jewelry in the central plaza, while the Institute for American Indian Arts delivers fashion-related college degrees in May.
This week, a gala at the New Mexico governor’s mansion welcomed fashion designers to town, along with social mixers at local galleries and bookstores and plans for pop-up fashion stores to sell clothes fresh off the fashion runway.A full-scale collaboration with Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week is bringing a northern, First Nations flair to the gathering this year with many designers crossing into the U.S. from Canada.Secwépemc artist and fashion designer Randi Nelson traveled to Santa Fe from the city of Whitehorse in the Canadian Yukon to present collections forged from fur and traditionally cured hides — she uses primarily elk and caribou. The leather is tanned by hand without chemicals using inherited techniques and tools.
“We’re all so different,” said Nelson, a member of the Bonaparte/St’uxwtéws First Nation who started her career in jewelry assembled from quills, shells and beads. “There’s not one pan-Indigenous theme or pan-Indigenous look. We’re all taking from our individual nations, our individual teachings, the things from our family, but then also recreating them in a new and modern way.”April Allen, an Inuk designer from the Nunatsiavut community on the Labrador coast of Canada, presented a mesh dress of blue water droplets. Her work delves into themes of nature and social advocacy for access to clean drinking water.
Vocal music accompanied the collection — layers of wordless, primal sound from musician and runway model Beatrice Deer, who is Inuit and Mohawk.
Phoenix-based jeweler and designer Jeremy Donavan Arviso said the runway shows in Santa Fe are attempting to break out of the strictly Southwest fashion mold and become a global venue for Native design and collaboration. A panel discussion Thursday dwelled on the threat of new tariffs and prices for fashion supplies — and tensions between disposable fast fashion and Indigenous ideals.“It worked like gangbusters,” he said. “We’ve seen the market substantially stabilized.”
offered researchers their first chance to assess the program’s benefits in a real storm. “It really was a prototypical storm that anybody who lives on the hurricane coast is liable to see in any given year,” said Malik.They collected insurance data on more than 40,000 houses in the affected area — a total insured value of $17 billion.
Fortified construction reduced claim frequency by 55% to 74%, depending on the designation level, and loss severity by 14% to 40%. Despite representing almost one-quarter of the policies studied, Fortified homes accounted for only 9% of claims.They even fared better than houses built to similar codes but without the official designation, likely due to the program’s more stringent verification requirements.