Threads of Migration: A Fashion Collection by Tammie Pontsler

For Tammie Pontsler, a designer and educator in Grand Rapids, Michigan, fashion is a means of conveying culture, values, historical periods, and identity. Her newest design collection, created for an MFA degree from Savannah College of Art and Design, is a visual representation of her family’s emigration story. The silhouettes of the garments lean heavily into fashion from the 1910s, the decade when her great-grandmother emigrated. The collection displays themes of preservation, adaptation, assimilation, and innovation while exploring the tension between the tailored structure and bohemian ease of fashions during this decade. She has collaborated with Norwegian-American artists who practice textile and Red-Listed folk arts, demonstrating the preservation of the culture’s past. Her use of technology, including AI, digital printing, laser cutting, flat-bed printing, and machine embroidery, reimagines these crafts as a gateway to the future. By bringing the past and the future together in conversation through fashion design, the emigration experience is visually demonstrated: leaving the homeland, holding on to traditions, adapting to the new country, thriving in the future through innovation, and a new cultural identity – the Norwegian American. Tammie be at Vesterheim to give a free presentation on Saturday, November 7 at 1:00 p.m. in Hanson Vesterheim Commons. Tammie will also give an online presentation on Zoom on Saturday, November 21 at 3:00.