The Latinx & Latin American sartorial, indexed.

§ About the archive

This archive documents exhibitions of Latinx and Latin American dress and fashion in the United States from 1940 to the present. Each entry is added by hand based on institutional records, exhibition catalogs, and press coverage. To make Latinx and Latin American dress practices more visible and critically examined, the archive uses an expanded notion of dress that includes modern design, folk garments, selected Indigenous dress and textile exhibitions, and fashion-related artistic practices. This approach recognizes that designer-centered exhibitions cannot fully account for the breadth of Latinx and Latin American sartorial practices. The archive also includes encyclopedic exhibitions: broad surveys of dress that are not centered on Latinx or Latin America but substantially include them. From a critical perspective on the ways modern fashion has separated “traditional” forms of dress from fashion, the archive also includes selected exhibitions of Folk and Indigenous dress and textiles as examples of systems beyond modern fashion that are nevertheless essential to understand the mechanism of curatorial practices the United States. Finally, the archive is a living document: entries are added as sources are found, and the abstracts, dates, and interpretations are ever evolving.