Indigenous resistance in and through fashion
I’ve decided to use Indigenous Peoples Day and Indigenous Resistance Day as an excuse—as if I needed one—to talk just a little bit more about Indigenous fashion, especially in Latin America.
I’ve decided to use Indigenous Peoples Day and Indigenous Resistance Day as an excuse—as if I needed one—to talk just a little bit more about Indigenous fashion, especially in Latin America.
September completely flew by! I find it quite hard to believe that the month is already over and, to be completely honest with you, I’m not even sure about what I did with my life for the past 4 weeks (since I wrote my last monthly roundup).
But then there have been a lot of exciting things going on in my life.
There’s so much left to say about decolonization that I could have continued expanding on the topic today. And I indeed wanted to.
Until I realized that Hispanic Heritage Month begins on Friday.
So I have to address that subject instead, right?
After taking a break from fashion to recover from burnout and reflect on my next steps, I can now say that I am still committed to continuing research in fashion, art, and design history and theory, and bridging the gap between art and design scholarship and the creative industries and art market.
As I try to take a break from fashion in the last couple of months, I’ve spent more time reading, learning, and thinking about Indigenous arts, including but definitely not limited to textiles and fashion. I’ve also started to work on a couple of related—and very exciting—projects. One of them attempts to lay out what we can learn from Indigenous methodologies to research Indigenous fashion. In this new exploration, I have inevitably stumbled upon some of my internal debates about “decolonization.”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how fashion functions. And by fashion I mean the global fashion system comprising relationships between things, humans, and the ecosystems that we are part of—not just a sort of plain exchange between producers and consumers.
In my musings about the functioning of fashion, I’ve also been thinking about its order.
Powered by RedCircle I realized last year that I’ve spent more than a decade researching fashion. It started as a sort of side-project, an interest I pursued during my free …
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Today I had the chance to participate in an Instagram Live that gave me a space to reflect about what “Indigenous” fashion is or should be and, more generally, on how to reject colonialist ideas in the Latin American fashion system.
I proposed collaboration as one of the main strategies for decolonization.
My mission of the day is therefore to highlight the need to question absolutely every narrative we’re told from Euro-North American perspectives about what fashion is and should be—whether it’s Latinx fashion or not. To do so, I’ll use my personal experiences as well as my experiences as an educator—as I end up doing almost inevitably these days.