Fashion at the Frontier

Revisiting Dana Bertran Merrill’s remarkable archive, this innovative interrogation of photographs of the anonymous workforce who built the Madeira-Mamoré railroad reveals how fashion inhabited a landscape defined by extractive capitalism, transnational migration, and uneven networks of power.

Bringing fashion studies into conversation with photography and the histories of labor and colonialism, it foregrounds the presence of migrant labourers from across the globe, Caribbean washerwomen, North American contractors, Brazilian engineers and sanitarians, and Indigenous communities. The result is a vivid account of how the camera both reinforced and unsettled racialised systems of classification and control.

Fashion at the Frontier offers fresh perspectives on fashion, time and archival silence, opening up new ways of understanding dress within the wider histories of Latin America and global modernity.