Navajo Weaver Naiomi Glasses Is Ralph Lauren’s First Artist in Residence

When Ralph Lauren chose Diné weaver Naiomi Glasses as the inaugural artisan for its new Artist in Residence program, she brought her whole family along with her.

In mid November, Glasses, a seventh-generation Navajo textile artist, paid a visit to Ralph Lauren’s tony offices in New York City ahead of the launch of her debut with Polo Ralph Lauren as part of the program, which links artisans with Ralph Lauren’s creative teams to create a collection. The space, outfitted in dark wood and forest green tartan along with a grand piano in the foyer, looked more like someone’s grandfather’s Upper East Side manse than the HQ for an American fashion brand. There, Glasses and the RL team had set up a display of the 24-year-old’s premiere capsule with Polo, which consists of men’s, women’s, and unisex apparel and accessories in a color palette inspired by her homeland on Navajo Nation, where she currently resides in the Rock Point Chapter community. Seated nearby was the Glasses family: her father, Tyler Sr.; brother, Tyler Jr., and mother, Cynthia. Each person has played an integral part in developing Glasses’s weaving skills, an art form for which the Navajo people are known and which was the backbone of this collection.

“I wanted to make these pieces feel modern, but still have those traditional Navajo motifs and design elements,” Glasses said while showing me around the display, which also featured sketches from the collaborations’ nascent stages, when she worked with an illustrator from Ralph’s side to get her ideas on paper. “I wanted to make sure you could feel the influence of my own Navajo weaving background, but also know that you could wear this to get dinner, or to go on a walk.”

A range of wool sweaters is woven with Navajo imagery and symbols, like a Spider Woman Cross, the Four Directional Crosses, or Saltillo diamonds. Most of the pieces are done in earth tones with a pop of red or blue; the colorway represents Glasses’s journey to becoming a weaver.

“Early on, I worked with a lot of natural sheep colors because my late grandmother, Nellie, used to stockpile all this wool she wasn’t using. She’d spin it for fun,” Glasses recalled. Along with her brother Tyler—who’d already begun learning weaving from Grandma Nellie, a revered rugmaker and weaver—Glasses used those scraps to practice, or to finish up Tyler and her grandmothers’s projects (when they allowed it). “My senior year of high school, they set up a loom for me, and I fell in love with the process,” she said. “I told my parents, I want to see what I can do with this. My parents have a business-oriented background, so they brought me back to earth. They were like, How is this craft going to provide for you?”

Turns out, Glasses had already enacted the Navajo time-honored tradition of turning weaving into a venerable business. “I was approaching it the way my grandma had: weaving and then selling to a trading post or a gallery,” she said. “So that’s what I would do: I would weave, I would take it into town—which was two hours away—and sell my weavings. That’s the way a lot of Diné weavers have done it for centuries, and that’s why trading posts became so popular on our nation. But at those trading posts, customers came with designs that they wanted the weavers to weave. I was inspired by the weavings before trading posts. That’s where Diné weavers were able to create their own patterns and weren’t confined to a certain style, or what people thought a Navajo weaving ‘should’ be.”

Many of the pieces from the Polo Ralph Lauren collection are based on those original designs. Additionally, the first drop (one of three, with two more upcoming) from Glasses’s capsule offers a selection of silver and turquoise jewelry that the artist and Ralph Lauren commissioned from seven Navajo and Hopi artisan families. This is the first time the American brand has created a program like Artist in Residence, or collaborated with a Native American artist despite the label drawing inspiration from Indigenous patterns, colors, and materials for decades. But Glasses said she’s the one who’s a fan: when her parents asked her to make a list of the brands she wanted to work with as a weaver, Polo Ralph Lauren was at the top of her list.

“I’ve had to be quiet about this collection for the past year-and-a-half,” she added. “Now, to be able to talk about it, I’m having all these introspective moments, thinking about the process. I worked closely with the design teams and I was fully embedded into their programs. And I was able to get to know each and every single person.” She equated the crew to being “like a family,” before gesturing to her own blood relatives on couches nearby. “My brother is my creative director—we were even able to include him on the creative direction for the Ralph Lauren photo shoot. He’s my photographer and videographer. My family has been with me through this whole journey. And this is how it came to life.”