CLANDESTINE ARCHIVES: Subversive Strategies through Clothing

The Centre for Fashion Curation invites you to a work-in-progress conversation exploring clothing as a site of clandestine communication, resistance and survival.

The archive has historically been thought of through the logic of conservation. But what happens when preserving something endangers life, and destroying it is the only way to survive?

The civic-military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile (1973–1990) established terrorismo de estado (state terrorism) as a method of control: around 3,200 people were executed or disappeared, and more than 38,000 suffered political imprisonment and torture. Strict control over information forced the resistance to devise clandestine objects of communication, capable of sending political messages, denouncing crimes and breaking through the regime’s censorship.

It was in this context that women political prisoners, held in detention centres and prisons across the country, hid messages in garments that circulated during visits, weaving a network of communication with their families and organisations. Among these strategies they used jackets, inside which messages were handwritten and, once out in the world, existed clandestinely on a threshold: helping ensure survival, or endangering life, since being discovered carried grave consequences.

In this work-in-progress conversation, Colectivo Malvestidas will share their current research into these jackets and the new work they are developing for The Stories of Clothes, an exhibition curated by Caroline Stevenson (LCF) with V&A East, opening at LCF in March 2027. The exhibition explores everyday garments as fragile archives, holding traces of social, political and cultural transactions.

The conversation takes place during Colectivo Malvestidas’ November 2026 research residency at LCF and V&A East. Bringing their research into dialogue with objects and archives encountered during the residency, this talk will explore how clothing can hold, transmit and conceal histories of resistance, memory and survival.