The act of self-fashioning through dress and the artful manipulation of fashion vocabularies within media representations present rich topics for critical inquiry. In this respect, meXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction does not disappoint. In this volume, the authors approach the topic from multiple angles and theoretical positions, and, using multiple writing styles, productively advance the study of dress with an emphasis on its performative and political potential.
In the introduction, Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú gloss the varied style communities and subjectivities featured throughout the book as “meXicanas,” a term borrowed from Rosa-Linda Fregoso’s influential meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands. According to the coeditors, this identifier highlights the potential hybridities born within figurative contact zones and literal borderlands. They use it here to emphasize that processes of identification for these groups are embedded within multilayered and contested historical, sociocultural, and political contexts of colonization, migration, marginalization, Indigeneity, and “cultural mestizaje” (1-2).
One of the greatest strengths of this work is its commitment to combatting a tendency toward essentialism in dress studies, particularly for what typically gets deemed “ethnic,” “minority,” or “subcultural” dress, by underscoring the complex, inconsistent, and sometimes contradictory ways we may experience self and how we variously perform those intersectional identities. The contributors have a difficult task contending with the limits of colonized and normative Eurocentric concepts and terminology that traverse multiple languages, as seen from the diverse list of collectives named and (re)defined throughout, including variations on Mexicana, Chicana, Xicana, Latinx/Latin@, and more. We generally accept that dress can help define, manifest, and manipulate features of social identity, providing a medium through which aspects of identity can be visually encoded, ranked, policed, and resisted through individual acts of embodiment. At the moment, however, our vocabularies in this realm, both academic and vernacular, often let us down, constraining our ability to adequately articulate the nuances of subjectivities created within complex social histories and personal biographies. The chapters of meXicana Fashions demonstrate many thoughtful attempts to interrogate old and invent new terms, categories, and concepts for identification and analysis.
meXicana Fashions is organized into three sections. Chapters 1 through 5 comprise the first section, Rendering of Self: Personal Narratives / Personal Adornment, and approach dress as a form of autobiography. Collectively, these chapters intimately impress upon readers how differently categories of belonging (and their expressive techniques through dress) may be experienced, imagined, and adapted by those who claim them or ascribe them to others. Subjective interpretations are influenced by changing eras and border migrations; many overlapping and subtly shifting stratifications related to socioeconomic class, race and ethnicity, origins, ancestry, age, occupation, gender and sexuality, beauty ideals, political allegiances, and connoisseurship, as well as more idiosyncratic factors of biography, physique, personality, and psychology. Many of these chapters include the sharpness of pain and the lyricism of collective memory. We witness how families can instill feelings of pride and comfort, while also, unwittingly, pass down the legacies of their own past suffering, perpetuating the oppressive patterns that constrained or excluded them. We must all find ways to fashion our personal identities within the shadow of family traditions and hegemonic cultural boundaries, grappling with the thorny questions that come with “recovering,” (re)imagining, recontextualizing, or reformulating existing categories of belonging.
Chapters 6 through 10 comprise the second section, The Politics of Dress: Saying It Loud / Saying It Clear, and build on the themes of the previous section, focusing on intentional, heightened, often contested and aspirational, assertions of self, both individual and collective, in the public sphere. These contributions examine acts of self-fashioning intended to resist or renegotiate the values and norms commonly encoded in traditions, ritual displays, mass media, art, literature, and patterns of consumption. Questions of visibility and representation percolate throughout. Many of the authors are particularly interested in quests for new visual vocabularies currently missing from most mainstream public spaces, as well as in critiquing their relative success at achieving broader inclusion or disrupting “normative power arrangements” (165).
Chapters 11 through 13 comprise the third and final section of the book, The Politics of Entrepreneurship: Making (It) / Selling (It), and continue with issues of counterhegemonic styling, situating them specifically in the fashion and entertainment industries. These authors explore ways music performers, clothing designers or “refashioners” (287), and everyday consumers both challenge and exercise agency within the limited vocabulary of archetypal Latina or Indigenous styles, aesthetics, and personas recognized within dominant mainstream, corporate-controlled structures.
For folklorists, dress scholars, and those interested in material culture, media, and gender studies, there is a lot to value here. A number of the contributors, however, prioritize an area studies audience that is well-versed in its academic jargon and theories, potentially limiting the book’s overall appeal or accessibility. I do wish the book targeted a broader readership, because the field of dress needs more scholarly offerings that work this hard to interrogate the imperialist Eurocentric categories we have inherited, and in the process, promote new vocabularies for resistance and healing. For this reason, I also wish more concerted effort had been directed at unpacking “fashion” itself as a category, which too often operates in scholarship as a glamorous synonym for “dress.” As it is elsewhere, the term is deployed inconsistently here for a range of meanings, from the market products and discources of a Western neoliberal industry born out of “modernity,” to any common or popular dress practices; to all sartorially coded communication; to consistent personal or community style; or even to simple creative innovation in getting dressed. These diverse and unqualified usages muddy the conversation by further masking or perpetuating the complex power dynamics bubbling under the surface of language.
“Fashion” so often serves as that rarefied and contested category that everyone is vying to penetrate or control. Again and again, meXicana Fashions demonstrates that being “fashionable,” being able to define or dictate what qualifies as fashionable in mainstream society, is a power relationship jealously guarded by social elites, gatekeepers, and transnational corporations. From this perspective, having fashion connotes having status and occupying a space of privilege. That marginalized groups are regularly denied access to hegemonic modes of “fashion,” that “ethnic” or “traditional” dress is rarely deemed “fashion” until a white (male) fashion designer appropriates it, that nonconforming individuals and subordinated groups must fight for recognition as “fashionable” in the mainstream public sphere is no accident, nor is the lack of adequate terminology to challenge fashion’s presumed superiority. As scholars of dress, rather than rushing to proclaim everyone’s dress “fashion,” we should be much more precise in the term’s usage and deconstruction if we are to truly shift awareness within existing patterns of thought. As Jade D. Petermon argues in her excellent essay in this volume, we should never mistake the limited gains of parity for the dismantlement of systems of exploitation, alienation, and oppression.
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[Review length: 1146 words • Review posted on March 11, 2021]