Fashion from Below

In Buenos Aires’ garment industry, workers reshape precarious working conditions through collective organization and throughout their trajectories of migration and garment work. Moving beyond victimizing or criminalizing narratives, Karlotta Bahnsen offers an ethnographic view of migrant workers’ negotiations of intersecting inequalities, with insights into transnational networks, the intersections of migration, gender, and labor, and the hidden structures sustaining Buenos Aires’ urban fashion industry. This unique perspective addresses scholars of Latin America, informal labor in global industries, migration and gender, while offering a vivid account of agency resonating beyond academia.