How do we express this in English? "Seasonal" refers to the weather, food, sports, TV shows and, of course, fashion cycles. For First Nations people across Australia, recognition of the land and seasons is intimately bound up with cultural identity.

For Shonae Hobson, it's part of the language of her ancestors. She's a Kaantju woman from Coen on Cape York Peninsula, where piinpi is an everyday concept.

And for the exhibition of the same name that she has curated, it informs the show's entire ethos.

Piinpi is a major survey of contemporary Indigenous fashion, featuring work by Indigenous artists and designers from around the country - both cities and regional centres - including textiles, traditional weaving, jewellery, hand-painted prints and streetwear.

The works come from major public and private collections, as well as new pieces from contemporary designers and art centres.

Now showing at the National Museum of Australia, having first opened at Bendigo Art Gallery in October, it's the first exhibition of its kind to show at a major institution.

How can it have taken so long for Australia to catch up to what has long been a thriving sub-culture of our art and fashion world?

"I think the timing now is really right," Hobson says.

"For a lot of people, First Nations fashion and design is quite a new thing. But obviously, it's been around for a very long time. There are a lot of First Nations designers who have been working for quite a while in the textile and design space."

As Bendigo Art Gallery's first First Nations curator, she had been inspired by visits to art fairs in Cairns and Darwin to create a showcase for Indigenous fashion - to bring it squarely into the world of art, design and history.

"It's really about introducing this new kind of medium, which is still telling the same stories and narratives as other forms of art, whether it be painting or fabric printing, or multimedia work," she says.

"It's still about living histories and living cultures, but conveying that to audiences who might not have that much knowledge about indigenous fashion and design, or indigenous art at all."

Grouped into four seasons, the show features about 60 works by some of the best-known artists in the industry, including Lyn-Al Young, who has an eponymous label, Grace Rosendale, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, the Bula'Bula Arts Aboriginal Corporation, Grace Lillian Lee, Margaret Rarru, and the MAARA Collective luxury resort-wear line.

And for all its beauty and wearability - there will also be pieces for sale in the museum shop - it's about as anti-fast-fashion as it's possible to be.

"I think audiences coming to see the exhibition will come away with a sense of pride and really support the designers and the work that they're doing," Hobson says.

"A lot of it is handmade, in home studios and art centres, and it really differs to that Western idea of fast fashion and mass-produced garments and products.

"It really is about slow fashion, about taking and using resources only when needed and only when necessary and really kind of embodying what fashion for the future should be, which is about sustainability as well."

For Margo Neale, head of the museum's Indigenous Knowledges Curatorial Centre, Piinpi is a perfect intersection of Western aesthetics and Indigenous values and sensitivities - and also perfectly timed.

"Like everything in the indigenous world, everything has to find the right place at the right time," she says.

"For me, it will strike a chord because it's wearable art, and people do look at and understand and appreciate wearable art.

"In the Western world, it can be read as a wonderful, aesthetic, fabulously pleasing piece of work. And in Indigenous fields it's particularly fantastic, because it's like our paintings. It's not just art, it's beyond art.

"In this case, these bodies are wearing country. Just like our art and our storytelling, it's about country, it's about transmitting cultural values, history, identity - it's about place."

And the show is about more than art and fashion. For the museum, Piinpi is the first exhibition with the Swayn Centre for Australian Design.

Named for the late Alistair Swayn, inaugural ACT government architect and leading practitioner for 40 years, the centre is focused on raising the profile of Australian design.

The centre's first senior fellow Adrienne Erickson says Piinpi fits squarely into its remit.

"The great value that the exhibition has to everybody is it expresses Indigenous stories, it shows a great deal of desire to really communicate stories in contemporary ways," she says.

"And it shows just the depth and, I think, engagement with design, that people really want to use disciplines or industries like fashion to really broaden out the Indigenous culture across the world."

Hobson says Australians should, like her, feel proud that this industry is thriving, and should see the exhibition as a way of learning more.

"Indigenous fashion is definitely a soft entry point for non-Indigenous people to learn about Indigenous culture and art and to share our stories and to really embrace it and be proud of it," she says.

"[They are] artworks, because it does have a lot of the artists' stories embedded, whether that's bush foods or the actual process itself, they're going out on country collecting material, so there's a lot to it.

"There's a rich kind of narrative embedded into the garments and jewellery pieces.

"I think Indigenous fashion has kind of been treated in the art space. But there's definitely a lot of work that's happening to have the fashion industry as a separate body and pushing the support of the nation's fashion and design.

"There are a lot of boundaries that are blurred from a commercial point of view. It's still an industry that needs a lot of support as well, and that's something that a lot of the designers are really pushing for."