Dr Elizabeth Kutesko

Biography

Elizabeth Kutesko is a fashion historian and alumna of the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she obtained her AHRC-funded PhD in 2016. Her research and teaching explores fashion as a transnational form of modernity, which ties together geography - telling stories of the land; nationality - telling stories of the nation; and identity - telling stories of the self. She has a specialist interest in Latin American bodily practices and the intersection between dress, identity, representation and power, particularly in how photography can stage interventions in understanding fashion in its global, postcolonial and decolonial contexts.

Her forthcoming monograph Fashion at the Frontier: Photography, Time and Colonial Modernity on Brazil's Madeira-Mamoré Railroad (2026) examines the relationship between fashion, photography and the temporal regimes of colonial modernity in the Brazilian Amazon. It explores how land was demarcated with the expansion of the North American frontier in South America, but also how the contours of different ethnic and racialised bodies were delineated and articulated through fashion and via the pseudo-scientific medium of photography. It moves across diverse fields of thought to consider histories and theories of photography and fashion, modernity and coloniality, labour and domesticity, gender and whiteness, whilst deploying pertinent historical methodologies for thinking about archival hegemonies and silences. By interrogating History as a critical practice in the fashioning of Latin America, her research questions the emphases and erasures that haunt Brazilian fashion histories.

She is the author of Fashioning Brazil: Globalization and the Representation of Brazilian Dress in National Geographic (Bloomsbury, 2018) and has published articles in ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Fashion Theory and dObra[s]. She leads the MA in Fashion Communication: Fashion Histories and Theories and the BA in Fashion Communication: Fashion Histories and Theories at Central Saint Martins, as well as overseeing PhD theses. She is interested in hearing from prospective PhD students whose research interests intersect with her own in Fashion Studies, Globalization and Transnational Studies, History & Theory of Photography, Decolonial Studies, Cultural Studies, and Latin American Fashion and Textile Histories.

Further information on her research projects can be viewed at elizabethkutesko.com.