Thinking Fashion from Otherness: A Conversation with Edward Salazar

Fashion upholds systems that define what "fashion" is. And simultaneously define what it is not. For centuries, this definition has been written by a Eurocentric gaze. How do we change that?

The archives of Western fashion, housed in our most celebrated cultural institutions, are not neutral closets. They are systems of classification. They are lexicons that, by defining what “fashion” is, simultaneously define what it is not. For centuries, this definition has been written by a Eurocentric gaze, a system of “progress and civilization” that, in the words of sociologist and cultural critic Edward Salazar Celis, has been imposed on much of the world as a “colonial legacy and wound”.

To challenge this system, a new generation of scholars is emerging. Edward Salazar is a vital voice among them. A Colombian writer, educator, and Ph.D. student at UC Santa Cruz, Salazar’s work operates at the precise intersection of Latin American and Latinx studies. He embodies a hemispheric perspective, analyzing the colonial-capitalist context from both his roots in Colombia — where he authored “Nostalgias y aspiraciones”, a study of Bogotá’s middle class — and from within the U.S. academy, where he critiques the absence of Latinx Designers in Fashion Archives.

His work posits a radical thesis: fashion does not simply have an “otherness” problem; it is that fashion (as a hegemonic system) is a machine for producing otherness. It is a form of symbolic power that creates divisions and renders entire communities invisible to legitimize its own center.

We spoke with Salazar about decentering this canon, the politics of the archive, and what a decolonial future for fashion truly looks like.

Oficio: Your career is quite hybrid, moving between academic journals and university books, but you have also written narrative essays for media such as El País or El Malpensante, and even co-created podcasts or worked on diploma courses. With such extensive experience but an unmistakable voice, what do you think is the responsibility of the cultural analyst today? Is it about “elevating” the discourse, politicizing it, or offering new tools for people to better understand the aesthetic world they already inhabit? What space does it have within the fashion ecosystem in LatAm?

Edward Salazar: The cultural analyst should develop a political, critical stance that responds acutely, pertinently, and committedly to the realities of the cultural ecosystem. Culture is not devoid of the realm of politics, economic relations, or power relations.

In fashion, we are trying to leap from a very traditional 20th-century fashion journalism — which was much more descriptive, simply reporting on seasons, colors, and trends —to a contemporary critique that wants to ask much deeper questions. Trends and style can even be a trap, hiding the discourses, narratives, and relations of power and creation that emerge from fashion. The fashion critic will do interesting work to the extent that they manage to captivate audiences who are not just fashionistas, but reading audiences who, just as they would with a film or literature review, can engage with a fashion proposal because they see something more profound than the simple emanation of seasonal trends.

O: A central concept in your work is the idea of “aesthetics in the plural” and the validation of “popular fashion.” In your text on Bogotá, you affirm that “one should not speak of popular culture in general but of popular fashion in particular” and that “one must speak in the plural: fashions.” Where do you see the most “conflicting” tensions today between hegemonic fashion — which dictates trends from global power centers — and these popular fashions that reinterpret, copy, or openly defy these dictates?

ES: What we have historically called “fashion” is simply the flat way of referring to “hegemonic fashion” — the production by designers and specialized media, which has achieved consensus as the “legitimate” form of fashion. In contrast, I say there are many types of fashion: we could talk about Indigenous fashion, queer fashion, Afro-diasporic fashion, and the one that interests me, “popular fashion.”

Why popular fashion? Because in terms of social class, for me, it is the fashion of the majorities. In societies as unequal as Latin America, the majority of people interact with fashion outside of that hegemonic fashion of the magazines. When one speaks of the popular, specific experiences of social class, racialization, and occupation of territory intersect. “Popular” here is not “pop culture,” but the fashion used by the majoritarian masses — often racialized, excluded, and precarious — who, despite this, do not renounce fabulousness, creativity, and splendor. The popular is not a single construction of taste; it is that heterogeneous, and often contradictory, juxtaposition of different types of styles.

O: Your work, especially “Muy bonito todo”, proposes the concept of “lo bonito” (the pretty) as a tool for analyzing popular and mass aesthetics, describing it as “a medium taste, without passions,” a “useful aesthetic median.” Today we live in an era dominated by the “aesthetic,” that inertia of wanting a curated and perfected world. How does your concept of “lo bonito” dialogue with this culture of hyper-aestheticization? Is “lo bonito” a form of resistance to the pressure of perfection, or has it been absorbed by the logic of the “aesthetic”?

ES: I proposed “lo bonito” (the pretty) as a challenge to the dominant categories of “haute couture,” “good taste,” or the “masterpiece.” It’s where functionality and beauty mix, but it also includes affective attachments that don’t respond to the valuation of a perfect, finished masterpiece, but to a much more organic process. For me, the “bonito” category disrupts these pretensions between high and low and questions the status of the masterpiece.

However, it remains a very Western way of thinking, as it perhaps forgets other dimensions — spiritual, cosmogonic, historical — through which material culture has value. Despite this, it retains the potential to contest legitimized, hegemonic categories of “the beautiful.” Many artists have used the language of plastic, merchandise, popular aesthetics, and domestic life to create visual languages that are far beyond the traditional canons of art.

O: I would like to turn the conversation towards academia... you call for building an academy that dialogues with national sources. What role does the act of archiving and reinterpreting, be it a family album or an old magazine, play in building an idea of “nation”? How does fashion, as a bodily and material archive, help us tell alternative stories of Colombia or any region, beyond the grand political or national narratives?

ES: The archive is what intrigues me most today. The archive is a “place” and a “practice” — the practice of deciding what is saved and what is not, what is worthy of being saved and what is forgotten. The archive is a place of power that not only builds the past but constructs notions of the future.

In Latin America, there are few large repositories of dress. Where they do exist, there is a colonial division: the archive of the “ethnographic object” (Indigenous, popular, peasant) versus the archive of “modern design.” This is an epistemological problem that separates cultures in relation to whiteness and non-whiteness.

That’s why I’m interested in what I call “gestures of the archive.” These are small, sometimes even poetic, appearances — a photograph, a tailor’s letter, a small detail on a garment — that are not grand stories but allow us to glimpse what is not present in the grand narrative.

This also includes the family album. But this invites a critical question: Who has historically been able to afford to document their family life? Who has had the right, or the possibility, to form an archive?

O: I think of your voice as a watershed for fashion theory in Latin America. Through it, you call to reject the “coloniality of knowledge,” advocating for an autonomous dialogue with respect to the academy of the global north. What, in your opinion, would be the most urgent concepts or methodologies that need to be developed from Latin America to analyze our own aesthetic realities, beyond applying European or US theoretical frameworks?

ES: Developments from the Andean world (like Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui) or the Afro-Caribbean (Aimé Césaire) have provided tools to understand the “coloniality of power/knowledge.” But there’s a political discussion to be had: the Global North has become “enamored” with these concepts, often as a new academic “fashion”, where the concept is invited, but the authors are rarely invited to the table.

These concepts call for a political praxis. A crucial tool has been to stop understanding Latin America as “hybrid” or “mixed” (mestizo). The idea of mestizaje has historically been romanticized, which erases the actual people and produces the idea that anyone born in Latin America has the right to use all cultures.

Against this, the idea of a “conflictive heterogeneity” (heterogeneidad conflictiva) is more useful. It forces us to recognize that Latin America is made up of diverse histories and bodies that are not necessarily “mixed” and are often in conflict. It obligates us not just to cite the other, but to sit down with the other.

O: Finally... What stories of Latin American fashion do you consider remain to be told?

ES: All of them. I would dare to say that even of the most traditional, “author” design, the privileged design, very little is known. And if we know little about the privileged designer, we know much less about other populations.

For example, I am researching the Bolivian designer Daisy Wende, a pioneer who proposed understanding fashion as a vehicle for social and economic transformation for artisans.

I am also working with the archive of the Museum of Ethnography and Folklore in Bolivia, which, under Aymara’s direction, has re-elaborated the importance of dressing for Andean cultures. They seek to disrupt the idea that dressing is something consumed through image, and instead understand it as a form of spirituality, protection, and cultural connection, where what is perceived by the eyes is only one dimension, and perhaps not the most important one. Just like that, there are so many stories that need to be told.

Salazar’s work teaches us that the task is not simply to “add” Latinx designers or other “othered” voices to the existing, broken lexicon. That is mere inclusion, a reinforcement of the center’s power to “include.”

The goal is to change the logic of the lexicon itself. It is to move from a system of classification to one of hybridity; from a binary heritage to an emancipated future”.

The true voices changing the industry are not those who are finally “included” in the old center, but those who, like Salazar, are building “counter-practices” and subverting the canon from the other side.

Fashion is not changed by being “seen” by the old system; it is changed by fundamentally altering how we see.