Before we delve into the many, varied and wonderful fringe jackets on the market right now, it’s important we pay our dues to the history of the surprisingly functional style.
The design was the result of a practical innovation by Native Americans, whereby the addition of fringe trimmings to traditional buckskin mountain wear and woollen ponchos helped the garments to shed rain and dry faster during the wetter months. Fringe, or sometimes quills, worked as water-wicking devices to quickly disperse water droplets.
The concept of fringe as a decorative embellishment only arrived in the early 1920s, otherwise known as the flapper era. Thanks to the daring and outrageous libertine women who chose to flaunt traditional societal expectations, skirts rose inches above the knee for the first time in Western history. Fringe at once became a provocative style choice for movers and shakers, as well as a means to add little bit of extra length to garments.
Native American-inspired fringe clothing in modern fashion, however, was born out of the late 1960s and early-70s hippie, free-love movement. If you’ve been bingeing Daisy Jones and the Six like the rest of us, you’ll already have an idea of just what this kind of style looked like. With a particular interest in civil rights and the support of minority groups across the country, young Americans often wore fringed jackets to show solidarity with Native American communities.
As we develop a better understanding of where we might be crossing the line from cultural appreciation to cultural appropriation, we feel it necessary to stress that wearing modern adaptations of native-inspired fringe jackets is all well and good. Traditional Native American clothing and regalia, on the other hand, is not a costume and is never appropriate to wear – even when bought second-hand through supposed vintage retailers.
