Kutesko, Elizabeth (2023) The Materialities of Working, Wearing and Caring for Clothes in the Brazilian Amazon. In: Fashion Cultures, Identities and Crisis, 1-2 June 2023, Yerevan, Armenia.
Type of Research: | Conference, Symposium or Workshop Item |
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Creators: | Kutesko, Elizabeth |
Description: | This paper is concerned with the relationship between fashion, time, global experiences of modernity and the complexity of transnational relations within the context of early twentieth-century United States-Brazilian visual culture. It presents a set of glass plate negatives which document the global migrant workforce who helped to build the Madeira-Mamoré railroad deep in the Amazon jungle between 1907 and 1912. Taken by New York fashion photographer, Dana B. Merrill, the click of the camera’s shutter marks a literal pause in the working day. Merrill’s intricate documentation of worn and weathered overalls and dungarees, cotton shirts, functional trousers, and utilitarian jackets are punctuated with occasional global accents, whether a Balkan waistcoat or an Indian turban, that cast light upon the geographic networks of industrial modernity. Nicknamed the ‘Devil’s Railroad’, due to the vast numbers of workers who died from a catalogue of disaster and disease, the railroad was an American-Brazilian venture intended to expedite the global exportation of rubber and other tropical commodities from landlocked Bolivia. The anonymous workforce elevated within these portraits had travelled to the Amazon from over 52 nations. They were exposed to all the elements, while responsible for the hard manual labour of culling the jungle, laying the tracks, building bridges and maintaining the right of way. Given the considerable dearth of everyday and working dress preserved in museum collections in the U.S. and Brazil, this paper uses poetry, diary extracts and memoirs to breathe life into the visual. Personal accounts of life in frontier societies such as the Madeira-Mamoré railroad and Panama Canal facilitate our understanding of the embodied and experiential memories of wearing, working and caring for clothes, but also highlight how salient aspects of dress were for social distinction and identity construction. |
Your affiliations with UAL: | Colleges > Central Saint Martins |
Date: | 1 June 2023 |
Event Location: | Yerevan, Armenia |
Date Deposited: | 22 Jan 2025 15:24 |
Last Modified: | 22 Jan 2025 15:24 |
Item ID: | 23314 |
URI: | https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/23314 |
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