By Eliana Gamboa

“Weavers of the Clouds: Textile Arts of Peru” was presented at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London from June to September 2019. Curated by British artist and curator Hilary Simon, the exhibition was the first of its kind in the UK and it included 150 textiles, garments, accessories, art pieces and photographs organised in eleven sections. With Peruvian materials, styles, and articles of dress constituting an on-going source of inspiration for Western fashion, this exhibition presented itself as an opportunity to examine the history, present and future of Peruvian artistic savoir-faire, and to use the language of fashion to challenge traditional divisions of form and function, cast a critical eye on the construction of tradition and reinterpret cultural knowledge. Surprisingly, however, the curator opted for a narrative that emphasised non-Western dichotomies of Peruvian culture as the essence of the country.

Although Peru is located in the geographical West, Stuart Hall points out that “the ‘West’ is as much an idea as a fact of geography.” ^[1] He explains that this concept works as an ideology to construct differences between cultures and that, initially, it started as a way for western Europe to define itself in comparison to the rest of the world… eventually extending the idea of the ‘West’ to include North America. Conversely Latin America—a region that became known as “Spanish America” after Spanish colonization in the sixteenth century—remained inextricably linked to its pre-Columbian past and the idea of a more ‘primitive’ civilization. Clothing constituted a visual tool to establish differences and to justify superiority over other cultures.^[2]

Based on this premise, few today would dispute that the legacies of colonial discourses extend to the museum space. “The museum as a modern institution has its epistemic foundation and raison d’ ´être embedded in colonial logic” ^[3] and power structures that still pervade the realm of culture and knowledge. ^[4]

In the last two decades shifts in the balance of cultural power have compelled many museums to critically reflect, interpret and display non-western collections ^[5] while advancing decolonial practices, Yet it is important to take a more nuanced exploration of these attempts; identifying the blind spots and controversial gaps that slip in between the good intentions. I argue that this is key in order to maintain its critical possibilities before we all end up reinforcing and reproducing the very power structures we set out to critique.

Surely, Hilary Simon aimed to celebrate traditional Andean vestimentary, but neglected to accommodate a broader, multicultural definition of Peruvian clothing as a visual system of representation. Rather the Other was admitted in her examination without any cross-cultural analysis. This was exemplified in the opening black and white photograph of three women. The first woman was white, tall and slim wearing a low cut knee-length dress made from what spectators would assume to be a Peruvian-inspired pattern. The other two were Indigenous women who walked ahead of her and carried their belongings on their backs.

In line with the critical notion that the dominant framework of fashion history persists unrevised, the contrast created in the welcoming photograph between the Westernised model and the two indigenous women played with an idea of a civilised world characterised by progress and a pre-civilised world led by traditions. The contrast between the first woman who walked freely without any burden and the other two racialized women who carried their belongings as a reference to their hands-on work, only served to reveal, yet again, the underlying West/Rest dichotomy. 

Opening photograph for the Exhibition “Weavers of the Cloud” Photograph by Toni Frissel for Harper’s Bazaar, 1952.

The stone wall in the background heightens the notion of timelessness and the overall contrast between Western and non-Western civilizations — linking Peru to a pre-civilized society where traditional methods of production play a secondary aesthetic role in an era of globalised production. In similar fashion, the exhibition catalogue cover (fig. 1) depicts women weavers and children wearing primarily traditional costumes in an Andean region. While this image may well depict rural life in the Andes, it endorses a racialised paradigm of Peruvian society as underdeveloped, fixed in earlier times and far-removed from modernity and by extension, rendering Indigenous weavers as the Other.

By capitalising on the concept of difference as a curatorial element in the construction of the identity of the weavers, the curator inadvertently endorsed non-Western dichotomies of Peruvian culture – Simon constructed a visual introductory reference for spectators to observe the exhibition through the lens of difference despite her good intentions to honour the craftspeople and their rural life in the Andes. As Jennifer Craik (1998) illustrates, “the ethnocentric underpinnings of western fashion ensure that differences between codes of exoticism and mundanity are played up” ^[6] to create meaning, but can inadvertently lead us into narratives that foster unequal relations of power and value. 

Liaising and consulting with source communities would have been a more adequate way of devising this exhibition in which dominant interpretative binaries (contemporary vs traditional; Indigenous vs non Indigenous; exotic vs non-exotic) could have been interrogated and challenged.

“Woven in the Sky”:  Agency and Self-Identification

The construction of difference arises from the concept of naturalisation. Let’s take a step back and understand coloniality as what Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano describes as the ‘matrix of power that produces and codifies racial and gender hierarchies...to maintain a regime of exploitation and domination that comes to be considered as ‘natural’.  ^{[7] [8]} This framework is not meant to explain just the external differenconces, but also the mental and cultural differences, which are also codified as superior and inferior by definition. In the modern museum context, these oppressive hierarchies also pervade the realm of culture, though it is harder to discern and much more insidious to overcome.

A close analysis of this construction can be seen In the “Weavers of the Sky” section of the exhibition. Five photographs out of seven depicted Andean women in rural Peru wearing mainly traditional costumes—the only Western fashion details were blouses worn underneath and only half visible. The remaining photographs showed a close up of women’s hands while working the textiles. In accordance with the way anthropology has conceptualised non-western cultures as timeless and unchanging, the curatorial approach regarded their craft techniques and their vestimentary as static. The female weavers as the Other were presented in a cursory way without any clear criteria of selection and no cross-cultural analysis. By the same token, the wall text failed to acknowledge the subtleties of their craft that has in fact adapted to modernity over time ^[9] – a key element that left a gap in the knowledge about how ethnic groups have transformed their dress style in ways that have allowed them to vary their socio-ethnic identities to become urban indigenous people.

The curator’s methodology raises questions about the museum’s positioning within the colonial matrix and how adequately it restructured knowledge and power to return agency to the main protagonists, in this case – the Indigenous weavers. The discourse centred on their Otherness rather than on a first person voice. The women were unidentified  — no caption on the wall, and no additional information in the catalogue. The artisans were commodified as a way to fit a narrow narrative that evidently overlooked their art as a source of knowledge and cultural production that engages with history as a subject and as an intellectual project.

An alternative and more effective curatorial methodology could have contextualised their artistry with film, text and images highlighting the complexity of making textiles and richness of their regional cultures. The inclusion of their voices through interviews would have afforded them agency about their skills and heritage from their own perspective.

Exhibitions like Viva Mexico! Clothing and Culture (May 9, 2015 - May 23, 2016) at the Royal Ontario Museum united the artisans’ accumulated experience by showcasing multiple videos of them spinning, dyeing, setting up looms, weaving and embroidering as well as the geography, people, festivals and rich socio-cultural context ^[10] Co-curated by Alexander Palmer, this exhibition broke down the hierarchical intellectual and visual canon of textiles by including a diversity of colonial and indigenous textiles and fashions from the eighteenth century to the present day.

The welcome reception of this exhibition which included movie size films of ancient techniques amongst the artefacts it depicted being made fed a wave of optimism regarding the extent to which the museum had managed to present different ways of seeing and thinking about fashion and textiles. In the co-curator’s words their curatorship was aware that ‘each interpretation by a scholar can only present a sliver of history and so has to focus tightly to offer new ways of seeing, learning and thinking.’ ^[11]

In ‘Weavers of the Clouds’, Simon missed the opportunity to prioritise new ways of seeing textiles and fashion in terms of their own aesthetic value. Instead, she monopolised the conversation from a Western lens that exoticised Indigenous communities as fixed in earlier times. Understanding Indigenous textiles in terms of the broader contemporary currents of visual representation is necessary to explore interventionist strategies that can foster different modes of spectatorship.

Contemporary Fashion: Tradition & Modernity

Latin America is a region that has been historically rooted in and characterised by underdevelopment and its countries are usually branded through the exoticism of their indigenous communities. Within the global fashion context, this view is interpreted  in the use of its cultures as inspiration, which is then translated into national stereotypes that link this region to its non-Western civilizations. ^[12] Simon introduced the work of foreign designers namely Vivianne Westwood and Naeem Khan whose collections were inspired by their travels to Peru, though their creative process remained unclear as she did not discuss the nature of the exchange – opening questions about  the line that demarcates cultural exchange from appropriation. 

Peruvian inspired design by Naeem Khan

Craik (1998) writes that ‘frequently exotic motifs from tourist destinations or from post-colonial cultures form the basis of fashion derivations.’^[13]  In this review I use Peruvian fashion as an example of how the Western fashion system ‘borrows’ from other systems and appropriates diverse influences in reconstituting new techniques of dress and decoration. If this concept may well apply to foreign designers, it is worth noting that Peruvian fashion is also an example of mutual appropriation where modifications of their traditional clothing are being made under the impact of Western culture. As discussed above, there is an ongoing negotiation of continuity and change, of tradition and modernity, of local developments and global influences. This notion was understood in the way the exhibition showcased Peruvian designers who are currently sustaining traditional crafts by combining the weaving and embroidery techniques of the Andes, and native materials such as cotton, vicuña and alpaca, with contemporary design.

Nonetheless, there was a palpable lack of close scrutiny on the politics of identity and representation through fashion – a gap in the exhibition that could have addressed dual cultural systems that highlight the interplay between western and non-western borrowing.

Rather, the curator took a different direction by featuring  three Peruvian designers as a separate group from the international designers. Strategies of separatism, wrote Stephen Gilchrist, ‘can raise the issue of essentialism’.^[14] I use Gilchrist’s analogy to highlight the curator’s disproportionate attention paid to the patterns, colours and textures of the collective designs, thus conflating ‘togetherness’ with ‘sameness’. As such each brand’s independent design identity was interpreted in Western homogenous perceptions of the country echoed in the styling of the mannequins through multicoloured patterns that eluded the viewer from any meaningful perceptual and cognitive engagement. While well-intentioned, this strategy solidified Peruvian identity into a singular entity lost behind a fictional opposition between tradition and modernity.

As a way of example, the figure below shows the styling created by the Mozh Mozh brand in which the influence of ‘Peruvian culture’ can be visually appreciated in its own space and terms. By contrast, the “Contemporary Fashion'' section of the exhibition styled the same collection in a way that generated a visual opposition to urban minimalism  – the weaved multicoloured pattern of the jacket, the texture of the green pants and multicoloured sweater were disproportionately displayed endorsing a narrative that prioritises colours, patterns and textures over design aesthetics.

Within this context, the decontextualization of the identity of each designer left a knowledge vacuum that prompted questions like would European designers be subjected to the same curatorial approach? A recalibration of discursive juxtapositions that decolonise canonical ways of seeing and displaying is important as we move into the future. As Gilchrist wrote, “creating more comparative installations that cross cultural and geographic boundaries can help to recalibrate pedagogical takeaways from the racial to the conceptual and perhaps even to the aesthetic”.^[15]

 The exploration of Peruvian aesthetics in the exhibition continued with a section titled “Tradition and timelessness: costumes of Peru” , which included ten mannequins dressed in traditional vestimentary clothing. In contrast to conventional fashion exhibitions, the mannequins were visibly shorter with wooden arms and braided wigs, and positioned as if standing on top of clay roof tiles. Here, Simon’s language did not speak about the complexities of Indigenous fashion from a global perspective, instead, opting to reinforce and reproduce existing preconceived misassumptions of it as being static, authentic and symbolic.

While the issue of transculturation and hybridisation of established traditions of weaving with contemporary methods was briefly introduced, it was codified as profoundly ‘different’ from contemporary fashion aesthetics as exemplified in the visual representation of the manequins. As such the uncontextualized costumes further contributed to the construction of power dynamics between the aesthetic value of the weavers’ craft and today’s industrialised world.

In comparison, an installation from the exhibition “The Inventors of Tradition” (2011) held in Glasgow, presented archival material and historical garments from the twentieth century Scottish fashion and textile industries alongside historical and new artworks engaging with craft, tradition and design.^[16] The exhibition was compelling in its proposal of designers, artists and craftspeople constructing a national identity through both tradition and innovation and in doing so, it recalibrated discursive categories and juxtapositions. This kind of interventionist strategy would have constituted a more effective methodology for ‘Weavers of the Clouds' as it engaged with narratives of quality in materials and artisanship even in an era of globalised production.

Fashion has been historically located all around the world, but it is the Eurocentric representations of hegemonic fashion that have generally emphasised that European fashion is at the origin of all other fashion systems, ‘while other nations/cultures/spaces have been depicted as static.’ ^[17] Contrary to this paradigm, the contemporary Peruvian designers in this exhibition ^[18]attested to the concept of tradition as a construct rather than a given that is increasingly being redefined and reinvented following social, cultural and economic developments. Regrettably the formulation and expression of their unique local cultural identities remained largely unexplored.

There was an equal void in the recognition of the Indigenous artisans’ contribution to building a national identity through the reinvention of local cultural heritage and vestimentary traditions as powerful means of distinction. Simon’s engagement in bringing her vision to life ultimately guided audiences in the canonising framework of the Western institution that reduced and simplified the rich cultural and diverse heritage of the country into a homogeneous and traditional national identity.

The need to interrogate and formulate proposals for the re-interpretation of exhibitions in non-canonical and non-hierarchical ways must continue – calling for culturally responsive, critically engaged, and innovative approaches to curation and cultural production. As we advance decolonial practices in contemporary museums, we must not only disrupt existing knowledge and perceptions of what we understand by design, fashion, and cultural knowledge, but also respond to the social structures in which they are structurally embedded.

In order to maintain our critical possibilities, a revisionist history of fashion would need to include a critical evaluation of the development of the concept of fashion rooted in the West/rest dichotomy. ‘Weavers of the Clouds’ serves as a good starting point to analyse  and reflect upon cultural essentialism in modern museums and fashion studies, particularly when generating narratives about Latin American cultures.

  

 

 

^[1] Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Formations of Modernity, ed. Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben, (Cambridge and Oxford: The Open University, 2001), 276.

^[2] Mariselle Meléndez, “Visualizing Difference: The Rhetoric of Clothing in Colonial Spanish.

America” in The Latin American Fashion Reader, ed. Regina Root (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), 17-30.

^[3] Brenda Caro Cocotle, “We Promise to Decolonize the Museum: A Critical View of Contemporary Museum Policies”, Afterall, 7 January 2019. 

^[4] Aníbal Quijano, “The Coloniality of Power”, International Sociology,  15, no. 2 (2000):  215-232.

^[5] Stephen Gilchrist, Indigenising Curatorial Practice

^[6] Jennifer Craik, The face of Fashion. Cultural Studies in Fashion, (Routledge, London & New York 1998), 17.

^[7] Aníbal Quijano, “The Coloniality of Power”, International Sociology,  15, no. 2 (2000):  215-232.

^[8] Anibal Quijano, ‘Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina’, Anuario Mariateguiano, 9, no.9, (1997).

^[9] Elayne Zorn, Cloth of the Sakaka of Bolivia in Latin America and the Caribbean, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2005), 395-402. 

^[10] Alexandra Palmer, “Permanence and Impermanence: Curating western textiles and fashion at the Royal Ontario Museum” in Fashion Curating. Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond. (Bloomsbury, 2018), 53-54.

^[11] Alexandra Palmer, “Permanence and impermanence: Curating western textiles and fashion at the Royal Ontario Museum”

^[12] Breward, Christoper and David Gilbert, “From Paris to Shanghai: the Changing Geographies of

Fashion’s World Cities,” In Fashion’s World Cities (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 3-32.

^[13]  Jennifer Craik, “The face of Fashion. Cultural Studies in Fashion”, (Routledge, London & New York 1998), 38.

^[14] Gilchrist, Stephen. Indigenising Curatorial Practice in The world is not a foreign land / curated by Quentin Sprague (Ian Potter Museum of Art University of Melbourne 2014).

^[15] Stephen Glicrhrist, Indigenising Curatorial Practice

^[16] Victoria Kelley, “From the Highlands to Clydebank: The Inventors of Tradition”, Afterall,  October 21 2013.

^[17] Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik, Modern Fashion Traditions Negotiating Tradition and Modernity through Fashion. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 3.

^[18] Designers were Meche Correa, Chiara Machiavello and Mozhdeh Matin.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Craik,  Jennifer. “The face of Fashion. Cultural Studies in Fashion”, (Routledge, London & New York 1998).

Christoper Breward, and Gilbert, David. “From Paris to Shanghai: the Changing Geographies of Fashion’s World Cities,” In Fashion’s World Cities (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 3-32.

Cocotle, Brenda.  “We Promise to Decolonize the Museum: A Critical View of Contemporary Museum Policies”, Afterall, 7 January 2019.

Gilchrist, Stephen. Indigenising Curatorial Practice in The world is not a foreign land / curated by Quentin Sprague (Ian Potter Museum of Art University of Melbourne 2014).

 Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Formations of Modernity, ed. Stuart

Hall and Bram Gieben, (Cambridge and Oxford: The Open University, 2001).

Jansen, Angela  and Craik, Jennifer. Modern Fashion Traditions Negotiating Tradition and Modernity through Fashion. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

 Kelley, Victoria. “From the Highlands to Clydebank: The Inventors of Tradition”, Afterall,  October 21 2013.

 Meléndez, Mariselle. “Visualizing Difference: The Rhetoric of Clothing in Colonial Spanish

America” in The Latin American Fashion Reader, ed. Regina Root (Oxford and New York: Berg,2005).

Palmer, Alexandra. “Permanence and Impermanence: Curating western textiles and fashion at the Royal Ontario Museum” in Fashion Curating. Critical Practice in the Museum and Beyond. (Bloomsbury, 2018).

 Quijano, Aníbal. “The Coloniality of Power”, International Sociology,  15, no. 2 (2000):  215-232.

 Quijano, Anibal.  ‘Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina’, Anuario Mariateguiano vol.9, no.9, 1997.

 Zorn, Elayne. Cloth of the Sakaka of Bolivia in Latin America and the Caribbean, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2005), 395-402.