Colonial Legacies: The Met Museum and the Absence of Latinx Designers in Fashion Archives
Willy Chavarría's Falling Stars sweater in the catalog of "In America". The designer used fashion to make a political statement about Latinx migration and living conditions in the U.S. Photo courtesy of Edward Salazar, 2024.
Fashion has created a myth of itself. The Met Gala, one of the major events of the fashion industry in the United States and beyond, helps consolidate that myth. The gala’s grand montages dazzle spectators. Celebrities on the red carpet dress to interpret each year's theme, offering audiences a glimpse of fantasy and glamour. Many—including me—tune into the spectacle on their screens, following live videos and social media commentary. But people in New York City can, just like the gala’s guests, engage with the curatorial exhibition that the event celebrates.
The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the most extensive fashion collection worldwide, organizes the gala as a fundraising event that represents the institute's principal income for the preservation, visibility, and research regarding the culture of fashion. However, the prevalence of the white body, of a white history, becomes obvious while exploring the institute and its archives. While containing fascinating objects from across the world that span seven centuries, the cultural institution reinforces the history of fashion as a linear, triumphalist European and colonial narrative.
Fashion’s self-created myth narrates a linear history that traces fashion’s origins to France and Italy, where a series of events—organized and orchestrated—occurred while modernity advanced. Events such as the rise of the fashion designer, the consolidation of fashion magazines, and, more recently, the creation of fashion collections fit and reinforce a myth that, as with any myth, contains traces of truth.
However, the rise of the myth of fashion parallels the invasion of the land we now call the Americas—attached to the exploitation of nature and people and also to the denial of any other form of performance. Just as colonizers subdued the cultures that already existed in the Americas, fashion also imposed the white, Christian and civilized appearance. The European designers and dresses worn by elites that fashion collections preserve as their privileged objects, as in objects worth caring for, mirror that history.
Museums, by and large, have not cared about aesthetics and materialities beyond the white gaze and have historically overlooked Latinx fashion and the fashion of any other group racialized as non-white. According to its website, the Met's Costume Institute preserves over 33,000 “fashionable” pieces, with roughly 8,500 from France and 14,400 from the United States. However, when navigating the U.S. collection, it is evident that the archive privileges the white United States. It is by no means an accurate reflection of the makeup of the country. The fashion archive creates a politics of visibility and invisibility by preserving the limits of a whitewashed nation in the contours of white fashion.
There are Latinx designers featured, including renowned figures such as Carolina Herrera, Oscar de la Renta, and Adolfo Sardiña, the last one less known to nonspecialized audiences. Although you can’t deny their merited accomplishments within the fashion industry, such names benefitted from white privilege, came from wealthy families or both. The designers' inclusion in the archive tells the history of race and class privileges of Latinidad in the United States and the hemisphere and creates a single version of Latinidad.
The cemented division between modern and tradition and conversely, fashion and costume renders Latinx- and Latin American-rich textile, design and dress cultures as the other of fashion. Through this separation and by privileging whiteness, the Met collection reinforces a colonial division of creativity. Instead of showcasing the wide gamut of Latinx and Latin American fashion, it focuses on the past. For example, searching for "Mexico" or "Mexican" turns up 60 results out of 35,000. Only 16 pieces are from the 20th century; none are from the 21st. The great majority respond to European tastes and traditions. Although you can perceive the traces of work and knowledge of Indigenous and non-white people within those pieces, little information is available. The problem persists when trying any related search—you'll find two results if you use "Latin," "Latinx," "Latina" or "Latino" or zero if you are searching for Puerto Rican references, despite the historical significance of the latter group's migration to the mainland United States. There are several levels of erasure of Latinx and other non-white groups.
Amid the ongoing interest of the Costume Institute in acquiring pieces from contemporary fashion brands, as seen in its blockbuster exhibitions, why is there no trace of contemporary design in this case?
The colonial definition of fashion informs the museum gaze. Fashion is change; fashion is future; fashion is European and now white U.S. American. Hegemonic fashion is still a symbol (and a symptom) of capitalism. The colonial legacies of fashion haunt the Met's costume archives and prove to be a complex problem to approach. Nevertheless, the decolonization of cultural institutions and their archives is not merely a project about statistic representation but the radical and transformative questioning of white superiority. Decolonization is also an act of solidarity. In 2021, the museum displayed its annual exhibition, the first after the COVID-19 pandemic: In America, a Lexicon of Fashion. The show also came after Vanessa Friedman's 2020 New York Times piece acknowledging “the incredible whiteness of the museum fashion collection.” The journalist sharply pointed out the absence of Black designers within major fashion museums in the Global North, a question that Friedman framed amid George Floyd's murder at the hands of a white police officer and the movement that ensued.
James Igoe, In America: Lexicon of Fashion, 2021, Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic. In the image: Gabriella Hearts's Ruana in collaboration with Manos del Uruguay, fall/winter 2021−2022
A Lexicon of Fashion proposed an effective reading of American design that challenges the idea of U.S. fashion as utterly functional (from what national perspective does “American” mean functional?). The 100 pieces in the catalog intended to account for a more diverse and complex narrative of the United States as a multiracial and multiethnic nation, where fashion mirrors such composition. The exhibition included 11 pieces from Latinx and Latin American designers based in the U.S.: Oscar de la Renta, Carolina Herrera, Raul Solís, Isabel Toledo, Rick Owens, Narciso Rodríguez, Gabriela Hearst, María Cornejo, Willy Chavarría, Fabrice Simon and Gypsy Sport by Rio Uribe. In light of representation, one can say that the Costume Institute tried to respond to the ongoing conversation about fashion whiteness and its erasures.
Indeed, in some aspects, the exhibition offered a more open history of fashion in the United States and a nuanced representation of Latinidad. Nevertheless, the show centered again on white and economically privileged designers with significant recognition in the global fashion industry. Their creations reflect the dominant taste of elite consumers. Moreover, the invisibility of fashion as collective labor historically practiced by Indigenous and racialized communities is still absent. When communities are (barely) mentioned, they are permanently attached to an established white fashion designer. For example, the exhibition included Gabriela Hearts’s Ruana, made in collaboration with a women’s organization called Manos del Uruguay, but descriptions of the pieces did not include a single name or history of rural women.
In the exhibition’s printed catalog, Fabrice Simon and Willy Chavarría represent two notable exceptions that open the space for decolonizing Latinx presence within fashion archives. Fabrice was a Black Haitian-American designer widely overlooked in Latinx fashion history after his death of AIDS in 1998. He proposed an artistic approach to fashion by painting the textiles and elaborating intricate beadwork that resembled art drawing, all elaborated in his factory in Haiti. The exhibition's catalog does not acknowledge Simon's Haitian origin. The omission is interesting when considering how Latinidad historically and systematically dismisses Haitian Blackness. The Met’s database information still has a lot of work to do regarding the politics of its archives.
Chavarría came from a working-class family of immigrant farmers from Fresno, California. His designs tackle cultural issues such as masculinity, gender norms and patriarchy, which he connects with his cultural heritage. His oversized pants hold a direct conversation with the aesthetics of the Mexican-American zoot-suiters who faced criminalization through racial and ethnic politics. Chavarría actively centers Brown and Black beauty as part of his creation. His background in the United States and Latin America led Chavarría to two remarkable achievements in 2023: On November 6, he won the Designer of the Year prize at the recently created Latin American Fashion Awards. On November 7, the Council of Fashion Designers of America bestowed him with the American Menswear Designer of the Year award. These events prompts us to contemplate hemispheric futures for fashion and its archives that recognize such intricacies.
Peter Lee, In America, 2021, Flickr, Attribution-NonCommercial2.0 Generic. In the image: Ensemble (autumn/winter 2020−21) designed by Rio Uribe from the brand Gypsy Sport
More interestingly, A Lexicon of Fashion borrowed items from 10 of 11 Latin(x) American designers featured in the exhibition. While the borrowing of objects to enrich or round out an exhibition can be commendable, it also exposes gaps in an institution’s permanent collection. If the show intended a comprehensive account of representation, the Costume Institute archive is still far behind in reframing the heart of its collection and developing a critical reflection regarding the politics of memory and preservation it directly or indirectly promotes. Such archives only offer limited and exceptional accounts of diversity and representation as a gesture without material consequences. Although it is crucial to remember the high cost of acquiring and preserving fashion—a reality that limits several institutions—it is also fundamental to reckon that the Met Gala provides unparalleled fundraising to the Costume Institute and any cultural institution. In 2023, the gala raised nearly $22 million. The year before it raised $17.4 million. Amid the limits of representation as merely presentation, we must question the museum's power, especially if we want to radically decolonize the politics of conservation.
On November 8, 2023, the Met announced the theme for its 2024 Gala: Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. The proposition is to dive into the institute’s archives to shed light on beautiful and iconic garments it can no longer exhibit on mannequins due to their fragile conditions. The theme also acknowledges the natural degradation of fashion materiality and proposes a poetic interpretation. On the one hand, the theme’s selection took place during a period of growing interest in the fashion archive among global brands, media and the general audience. The fashion industry recognizes that archival and curatorial practices serve as contemporary vehicles for increasing capital profit. Exhibitions in cultural institutions further enhance the cultural value of global brands, thanks to the museums’ associated aura and legitimacy. Consequently, the museum transforms into an extension of fashion conglomerates and serves as an institution for the reproduction of capitalism.
On the other hand, the gala’s description states that the event will center on "historical garments and rarefied contemporary fashions." The official image is an 1889 evening cloak from French couturier Charles Frederick Worth—one of the so-called founding fathers of fashion. The images circulating in fashion media show contemporary white European fashion brands at the center of the exhibition. Judging by the pervasive coloniality of these fashion archives, we will likely not see Latinx and underrepresented communities presented as sleeping beauties. The forthcoming exhibition is likely to reproduce colonial melancholia and obsession with its own white and glorious past.
In his A Modest Manifesto for Museums, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk beautifully stated, "The future of museums is inside our own homes." He recognized how national and Eurocentric narratives have shaped cultural institutions; he also encouraged us to think beyond that power by looking at everyday life and reflecting on the spaces where collective memories grow and social reproduction occurs. Perhaps because of such ongoing gestures of colonial power as enacted by the Costume Institute, the future of museums is not within the museums themselves. It continues to exist elsewhere, in other ways of knowing, in other places for looking.
How do we undo the modern and colonial archive, and what would a decolonial fashion exhibition look like? Critical analysis of the power expelled by cultural institutions is fundamental in that endeavor. While the Met does not encompass the entire landscape of the relationship between fashion, museums and archives, it undoubtedly stands out as one of the most influential and prominent institutions, particularly through its Costume Institute. Additionally, it's crucial to recognize the emergence of counter-archival and counter-curatorial fashion practices taking place across the Americas as significant spaces for the production of critical thinking in the realm of fashion. For example, the exhibition Objects of Performance centered on Puerto Ricans and other migrants' labor in the development of the New York City apparel industry along with contemporary Latinx fashion designers. And the art collective Cholita Chic in the Chilean-Bolivian-Peruvian border integrated by anonymous artists is actively engaging with the Andean figure of the Cholita as a futuristic, fashionable and political identity.
So how do we generate a decolonial future in the Latinx fashion archive? It is not possible to do so without the politics of solidarity that gathers the creative experiences of Latin(x), undocumented, Black, queer and Indigenous subjectivities and collectivities, among others, to think beyond national identities and the white gaze. Questioning fashion and museums' power is a necessary exercise to unmount the colonial division of creativity. To think and to create a future where Latinx beauty matters.
Edward Salazar Celis is a Colombian writer, cultural critic, and educator based in California, specializing in Latinx and Latin American arts, fashion, and visual cultures. He is the author of the books Nostalgias y Aspiraciones and Estudios de la Moda en Colombia. His work straddles public humanities and academia, where he serves as a writer, researcher, consultant, lecturer, and cultural commentator, focusing on colonial legacies, histories, resistances, and the beauty of Latinx and Latin American fashion and visual cultures.
Edward is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has received numerous awards and public recognition, and his work has been funded by the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Science (Colombia), the University of California, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (United States) through the expanding Latinx Studies research project with Dr. Catherine Ramírez.