Christiane Waneissi
Fashion designer
Lifou Island
Christiane Waneissi’s (pictured above, far left) work as an Indigenous fashion designer has received international recognition since she launched in 2020, including staging a runway show at Paname Social in Auckland, as the opening event of the 2025 New Caledonia Season in New Zealand.
Waneissi launched her fashion brand Chateaubriand Wear and e-commerce platform during COVID: “My goal with this digital tool is to enhance the presence of the Kanak handicrafts and also Pasifika handicrafts online, to reach the global market,” she says.
Chateaubriand is named after her place of birth, Chateaubriand, a bay in Lifou. “I was working with Aboriginal designers and Māori designers. This helped me to be on a very high level, to have an overview of the importance to show our culture, to show who we are. The best manner for me to show my culture, my country and my Indigenous wahine in the world is to sell online the Mission dress, which is the traditional Kanak outfit.”
Waneissi says her professional network is mostly the associations of women in the Loyalty islands of Lifou, Mare and Uvea. “We have several creative collectives and associations: seamstresses, we have also
craftswomen, weavers, carvers and jewellers as well. They are all providing the platform and they can also follow workshops and trainings with us to upgrade our product.
“When I started the digital business in 2020, I had only two Kanak seamstresses from New Caledonia. Two years later I added seamstresses and artisans from Tahiti, and basket weavers from Fiji, Vanuatu and Samoa.” She has an international goal after she attended the second edition of the Creative Pacific Foundation Event in Utah in 2024 and displayed her “Lapita collection”. She then went to Canada to attend five months sewing and tailoring training in Quebec. “I have the ambition to collaborate with First Nations designers and retailers in Canada,” she says. After her training in Quebec, she participated in Fiji Fashion Week in 2025 and displayed her new “Lifou aelan collection”. Her collection was so successful that Pacific Fusion Fashion Show invited her to showcase at New Zealand Fashion Week. “It was a good opportunity to show my brand because PFFS is a proud Pasifika space and I was surrounded by professional designers and had visibility.”
When she started, Melanesian women artisans approached her asking how they can be a part of her business. “They want to know how can they set up a partnership because we are Indigenous. We can share this tool and we can use this superpower of Indigenous storytelling to do the marketing for our respective brands. But we are also facing a lack of funding for training … we need money to fund our training and for the capacity building. We know that the world is waiting for our Indigenous brands, we need help to just step up. My message to other Indigenous women is: ‘Don’t be afraid, take your space, tell the world who we are, who you are, it’s important to show who we are because the singularity is part of our marketing’.”
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