Fashionably Ethical Indigeneity

Ethical and Sustainable Fashion in Peru

Cusco Always in Fashion Social Responsibility runway at the Colegio San Borja in Cusco. Film still by Patricia Alvarez Astacio

As the bell rang, the elementary school children of the Colegio San Borja in Cusco took front row seats on the sides of the red runway that cut through the school’s interior patio. Their school was founded in 1621 by Spanish colonial authorities to westernize the children of Inca nobility: dress was one of the indices of this Westernization. Today, the school serves mestizo and Quechua children from low-income communities surrounding Cusco’s tourist center.

Fashionistas, influencers, members of the press and other industry actors who typically occupy the front rows stood behind the children to see the 2010 Cusco Always in Fashion’s (CAF) Social Responsibility runway. After the school choir sang the Peruvian national anthem, techno-huayno music—a fusion of techno beats and Andean huayno—began playing. Tall, thin models walked onto the runway wearing alpaca wool outfits designed by Peruvian fashion designers who collaborated with Indigenous tejedores from the Cusco region to manufacture their collections. Seven Peruvian designers showcased collections that incorporated aesthetic elements associated with Andean indigeneity with various contemporary styles, including urban-street styles, elegant attire and avant-garde fashions. Despite the stylistic diversity of the collections presented, all were considered ethical and sustainable fashions.

CAF was just one of the many fashion events that took place throughout Peru during my ethnographic fieldwork between 2010 and 2012. I got the opportunity to observe the first Lima Fashion Week and attend Peru Moda, an annual national trade event that hosts fashion runways by Peruvian designers alongside booths that showcase alpaca wool and the work of manufacturers including Indigenous artisanal workshops. Runways were held in sites of historic and cultural significance, such as Colegio San Borja and the Coricancha in Cusco, linking fashion to a pre-Hispanic textile lineage. They also occurred in lugares populares, public spaces frequented by people of all classes in a bid to democratize fashion. To this day, runways can be regularly found in artisanal crafts fairs across the country. 

These events not only spotlighted the work of Peruvian fashion designers but highlighted the labor and skill of Indigenous artisans and promoted Peru’s national flagship materials, materiales bandera: alpaca wool and pima cotton. After Peru’s gastronomic boom in the early 2000s, many in the government saw fashion as the next arena to follow suit. As a government bureaucrat from the National Commission for the Promotion of Peru for Exports and Tourism (PROMPERU) told me, Peru has luxury sustainable materials like alpaca wool and an expert manufacturing workforce with “millenary” textile traditions. The growth of the national fashion industry could help position Peru as a competitive hub for ethical and sustainable fashions. Fashion actors could source the sustainable and luxurious alpaca wool, and ethically collaborate with Indigenous artisans, seen as inheritors of unique “ancestral” skills and “millenary” traditions.

 Schoolchildren and other attendees looking at a model walking on the runway. Film still by Patricia Alvarez Astacio.

Ethical and sustainable fashions began in the early 2000s in response to growing consumer concerns about the industry’s environmental impact and its exploitative labor practices. Even though ethical and sustainable fashions are seen as a way of addressing some of these structural issues plaguing the industry, there is no single definition of what ethics and sustainability mean, as Kedron Thomas points out in her 2019 Fashion Theory article, “Cultures of Sustainability in the Fashion Industry.” Sustainable and ethical interventions can take place at the level of material sourcing, design practices, manufacture, retail or consumption. It can mean fostering worker autonomy, paying fair wages, artisanal and small batch production or establishing ethical collaborations with manufacturers to avoid cultural appropriation. 

Many of these ethical and sustainable fashion supply chains operate as what Nadira Lamrad and Mary Hanlon call “fashion for development.” Fashion for development refers to fashion brands that contribute to development efforts, such as poverty alleviation and women’s empowerment, by contracting artisans or donating a certain number of goods for every purchase made. Often, NGOs or corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives facilitate these supply chains.

In Peru, many of the NGOs that proliferated after the country’s two decades of armed conflict and authoritarianism tapped into existing artisanal networks to advance their development efforts. These pre-existing development networks began to expand the scope of labor for textile artisans who could now also manufacture fashion. Through these networks, Peruvian and other designers and brands could more easily work with Indigenous artisans to create ethical, sustainable and socially responsible fashions in ways deemed collaborative and non-appropriative in fashion.

These collaborations between fashion designers and indigenous artisans are framed as re-valorizing the same Indigenous aesthetics historically cast as the antithesis of a Peruvian modern identity. Historically, the symbolic weight of race has fallen on Indigenous dress more so than on phenotype, a person’s physical traits.

Imagining Peru’s Indigenous population as part of the modern nation-state has been as much an aesthetic dilemma as a socio-political one. The Western fashion system creates wish-images that reconcile, at the imaginary level, racial and social contradictions left unresolved in other arenas and represents these as modes of being within capitalism. Runways, like CAF’s Social Responsibility runway, help reconcile the terms of how indigeneity can be re-valorized as part of Peru’s post-conflict, neoliberal, democratic, multicultural present. As María Elena García shows in her ethnography of Peruvian gastronomy, this re-valorization of indigenous cultural objects indicates respect, recognition, nationalism and market value. However, as García also points out, these processes of re-valorization sustain capitalist exploitation of indigenous labor and lands. For those involved in these cultural industries, this commitment normalizes practices of selecting which Indigenous cultural elements can be re-valorized, how they can be utilized and which will be excluded.

The final collection shown at CAF’s social responsibility runway, for example, featured urban-street styles that centered Andean aesthetic elements. The designer transformed alpaca wool blankets and licllias, shawls, from Ocongate, Cusco, into casual blazers paired with jeans and sneakers, sweater dresses combined with flat booties, and a trendy pea coat. The Andean elements of these outfits were stylized by the designer. Stylization describes the processes of adapting traditional aesthetics to Western design and style parameters. The woven iconographies in the blazers were enlarged to make the designs less “busy” without competing design elements. While the designer kept the bright colors of the Andean color palette, she used color blocking to minimize the number of colors typically combined in the blankets from Ocongate and in Andean licllias.

Instead of having the iconographies woven using additional bright colors, these were made using darker or lighter shades of the surrounding colors. One blazer had three color blocks: white, dark blue and pink. The iconography in the white area was rendered in light blue, in the dark blue area a darker shade of blue, and red was used in the pink area. This approach allowed the designer to maintain what many would recognize as Andean colors while taming the color combinations according to Western color theory notions that define which color combinations are harmonious or contrasting.

This collection represents inclusion because it was made in collaboration with Indigenous artisans and utilized visibly recognizable Andean aesthetics to create contemporary urban-street styles. The collection moves away from tropes that posit indigeneity as existing outside of modernity. The collection re-imagines the vilified image of the cholo, an Indigenous figure that contaminated by urban life loses its purity and authenticity. Here, indigeneity is portrayed as part of contemporary urban reality, challenging such tropes of purity and contamination. The use of bright Andean colors seamlessly aligns with the bright colors also associated with urban and street styles, which emerged from communities of color. While the collection embraces an Andean color palette challenging inherited colonial perceptions that see bright color combinations as signs of the native’s child-like attitudes and primitiveness; it does so by taming or diluting it. The collection materially and symbolically re-shaped indigenous textile elements into Western garb that conforms to Western standards of good design and style.

Models and guests in the plaza in front of the Colegio San Borja. Film still by Patricia Alvarez Astacio.   

As the event wrapped up, models walked onto the runway and into the plaza in front of the school. The attendees followed, walking around the models who posed next to the designers. Schoolchildren asked models and designers to autograph their notebooks, others took photos next to models. Standing in a corner, I overheard children make comments like “such a pretty lady,” or “how weird,” as they pointed to the outfits. Some artisans who had congregated near me said, “These do not look like anything we make.” Making my way through the packed plaza back to the school I found organizers clearing out. One of the event organizers saw me and said: “que bonito quedó, no? This is social responsibility, and we didn’t have to sacrifice fashion.”

For CAF’s organizers, social responsibility and ethics went beyond the fashions shown; the runway itself had to enact inclusion and ethics. This event was not just free and open to the public, with low-income Quechua and mestizo children occupying the front rows usually reserved for elite fashionistas, press and industry actors. Many involved with the event saw this as an example of fashion’s democratizing force. According to Gilles Lipovetsky in  The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2002), fashion is a democratizing influence, promoting individualization and the formation of consumer-subjects who hold the democratic values of tolerance, pluralism and openness to transformation. This view resonated with fashion designers and event organizers, as well as with Peru’s contemporary context. After decades of armed violence and authoritarianism, democracy unfolded alongside neoliberal policies that fostered the expansion of capitalist markets.

The expansion of ethical and sustainable fashion supply chains supported a national fashion cultural revival. This fashion revival unfolds within a capitalist industry striving to present itself as ethical, sustainable and inclusive. In the context of Peru’s racial history, in which Indigenous cultural objects were deemed unmodern and in poor taste, and a recent violent past that disproportionately affected indigenous communities; multiculturalism and social inclusion gain additional weight. Fashion is an arena from which to imagine, materialize and embody a reconciled nation through cloth. Building on Wilson’s argument, fashion not only helps reconcile diverse ways of being within capitalism but aids in reconciling a national identity marked by a deep racial divide.

However, this celebration of the individual promoted through a democratizing view of fashion, as Dorinne Kondo points out in her book, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater (Routledge, 1997), does little to acknowledge how this consumer-subject is inseparable from capitalism and bourgeois possessive individualism. It is a celebration that relies on erasing histories of power, colonization and domination. Instead of the forceful imposition of Western garb by Spanish colonial authorities in 17th century Peru, as seen in the early days of Colegio San Borja; today, events like CAF mobilize Indigenous elements as part of fashion to trigger the individual desires and imaginations of the local population. This democratizing process doesn’t hope to create colonial subjects, but aspiring consumer-citizens of a multicultural nation who display their individual identity through dress. One can now be stylish, urban and Indigenous—if one follows current trends and have an eye for design. This process involves implicit expectations of proper ways of displaying a fashionable indigeneity: avoid wild color combinations, make sure an outfit is not too busy, combine Indigenous elements with jeans.

This vision of fashionable inclusion does not fully shift Peru’s racialized terrain of power. While events like CAF acknowledge the low-income status of many attendees, it proceeds as if class status would not hinder the ability of those children and community members to become fashion consumers. No one is suggesting how to be fashionable on the cheap much less challenging the conditional inclusion presented. One designer I spoke with remarked, “They might not be able to buy things, but they can probably make some things, they now have ideas, and I’m sure many of the families of these kids have or work in textile workshops. After seeing the runway, they know they don’t have to repeat the same alpaca sweater over and over again.” If low-income Quechua and mestizo children, who see their textile traditions transformed into fashion, cannot be consumers, they can still become productive members of the nation as producers.

It is assumed by many involved in the fashion industry—Peruvian or not—that by using Andean aesthetics, materials, techniques, and designs, indigenous people present (or those with Andean heritage) can recognize elements of their indigeneity in a new form. While these outfits represent indigeneity in a new form, it should still be familiar enough to create a sense of recognition and identification, and for those who made them a sense of pride. As such, these styles should trigger in Indigenous artisans innovative and creative ideas of what they can make with their traditions. Yet, what I observed throughout my fieldwork and in this event troubled this assumption. After all, the comments I overheard at the plaza in front of the Colegio San Borja suggested something else: “look how weird [these outfits are],” “es que nosotras no hacemos esas cosas” (we don’t do those [textile] things), “these do not look like anything we make.” Ultimately, CAF’s runway shows how fashion can serve as a tool for imagining and materializing inclusion, while at the same time reinforcing existing racial power dynamics.

Patricia Alvarez Astacio is a Puerto Rican anthropologist and filmmaker. Her research and films explores topics of fashion, ethics and sustainability, capitalism, labor, indigeneity, visual and material cultural production in Peru, the Caribbean and Latinx communities in the United States. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Film, TV and Interactive Media Program and the Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Program at Brandeis University.