Honoring Heritage: Hoyle Hat Co & Hudson’s Bay Blanket Company Hat Collab
On National Indigenous Peoples Day, we reflect on a layered and often painful past—commerce, culture, colonialism, and resilience. Our collaboration last year was approached with humility, respect, and an insistence on context.
The Hudson’s Bay Company, chartered in 1670, expanded through the fur trade—entangling commerce with governance across vast territories.
The striped wool blanket became an enduring symbol—useful, iconic, and deeply contested for many whose lives intersected with its trade.
This history is inseparable from settler colonialism and land dispossession. Any contemporary work with these symbols requires context and care.
“We did not approach this as a co-brand moment. We approached it as a conversation—one that acknowledges the past and insists on listening.”
The collaboration: what it meant to us
With Miller Interior Designs, Himikalas Pam Baker, the Santa Fe Fashion Show, Sunrise Hat Supply, and our community of makers, we set strict intentions—center Indigenous voices, invoke tradition responsibly, and ensure value flows back to the people whose stories are bound to these symbols.
- Center Indigenous voices in consultation, credits, and storytelling.
- Invoke tradition responsibly—blankets as memory carriers, not decor.
- Educate and inspire through context in product pages, media, and events.
- Share value via fair splits, royalties, or contributions where appropriate.
Contemporary Indigenous designers blazing trails
Beyond legacy brands, Indigenous designers are defining fashion on their own terms—honoring lineage while innovating boldly.
Ceremonial and everyday pieces that carry Haida art forms forward.
Design grounded in body positivity, mental wellness, and identity.
Luxury outerwear blending place-based materials and story.
Streetwear by Justin Louis of the Samson Cree Nation—modern narratives in motion.
Indigenous-owned fashion house blending cultural storytelling with modern elegance—seen in jackets featured throughout this post.
A platform in Toronto celebrating designers from across Turtle Island.
Heritage is not a motif. It is relationship, history, and responsibility.
Supporting Indigenous brands helps shift recognition and resources where they belong.
Honest engagement names the past—land, labor, and cultural loss—while building better paths forward.
Every honest collaboration can strengthen languages, practices, and tradition.
A toast—with humility
On National Indigenous Peoples Day, we raise our hats to the stories behind the stripes, to voices too often silenced, and to the resilience that endures. Our work with the Hudson’s Bay blanket was a learning moment—rooted in transparency, respect, and partnership.
To Indigenous designers and makers everywhere: thank you for your courage and craft. A special thanks to Williee of Hampui Hats—whose hands helped turn vision into reality.
Written by Michael Hoyle
