DRESSING THE ARCHIVE, FASHIONING LATINIDADES

This digital project navigates a constellation of fashion archives: from dominant and institutional collections to those that are community-based, experimental, and even imaginative. It also explores archival practices that employ el vestir as both a political statement and a poetic strategy.

The archive is having a cultural peak. The archival is a fetish. The fashion museum is a trend.

Yet Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean dress archives remain scarce, dispersed, fragile—often haunted, often wounded.

Fashion is an invention; latinidad is an invention. This land has many names. The Indigenous Kuna people call it Abya Yala; the Tupis-Guaranis called it Pindorama; the Afro-Brazilian intellectual Lélia Gonzalez named it Améfrica Ladina. Many activists and thinkers call it el sur, los sures. But the south also lives in the north. Latinidad speaks loudly in the United States and throughout the diaspora.

Amid all these complexities, so many sartorial and archival stories remain untold. Fashioning Latinidades / Dressing the Archive hopes to open a space for them, to fill a gap, to imagine other ways of remembering and dressing.