UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation examines the nexus between the fashion industry and development projects in the Andean highlands of Peru. Through an ethnographic analysis of the alpaca wool supply chain; it explores how indigenous artisans are interpolated into “ethical fashion” networks as skilled manufacture. It demonstrates how business relations are facilitated and mediated by NGOs and the social responsibility offices of corporations that profit from natural resource extraction. This study critically interrogates the concept of “ethical fashion” to illuminate how national struggles over indigeneity and indigenous lives, race and racism, and differential experiences of violence and authoritarianism are reshaping the fashion industry and the garments it produces. This research analyzes how fashion is constructed as ethical, and by extension what counts as ethics in the fashion industry. Drawing attention to encounters between highland artisans, development workers, and fashion designers, I chart how racial relations and imaginings of indigeneity take visible and material form through design practices and aesthetic negotiations. By exploring what gets to signify “indigenous” and how these signifiers become part of the capitalist dream world of fashion, this dissertation shows how exclusion and structures of inequality are produced through this assemblage of actors and interests that operates beneath the gloss of the “ethical supply chain.”