Elizabeth Kutesko is a fashion historian and alumna of the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she obtained her PhD in 2016. Her research 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 leads the MA and BA in Fashion Communication: Fashion Histories and Theories at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She is the author of Fashioning Brazil: Globalization and the Representation of Brazilian Dress in National Geographic (Bloomsbury, 2018) and is currently working on a new book Fashion and the Devil’s Railroad: Dress, Temporality, and Modernities in the Brazilian Amazon (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Further information on her research projects can be viewed at elizabethkutesko.com.
Teaching
Courtauld:
MA Documenting Fashion: Modernity, Film and Image in Europe and America, 1920-1960
BA Sensory Encounters in Dress and Textiles
Central Saint Martins:
MA Fashioning Clocks: Fashion, Time and Global Capitalism, 1884-2024
MA Re-imagining Fashion Histories: Tracing Parallel Cosmologies
Recent Publications
‘A Photographic Fragment of Transnational Fashion: Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Snapshot of Avenida São João, Central São Paulo, 1937.’ Dune, 2:1 (2021)
‘Entering the Contact Zone: Reflections on a Conceptual Framework used to study Brazilian Fashion’, ZoneModa, 9:2 (2019)
Fashioning Brazil: Globalization and the Representation of Brazilian Dress in National Geographic (London: Bloomsbury, 2018)
‘Fashioning Brazil: National Identity and the Politics of Globalisation in Contemporary Brazilian Fashion Photography.’ Photoworks Annual, Special Edition: Fashion and Style Politics, (November 2016)
‘Fashioning Brazil: Globalization and the Representation of Brazilian Dress in National Geographic Since 1988.’ Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, Special Edition: Brazilian Fashion, (2016)
‘Problems and Tensions in the Representation of the Sapeurs, as Demonstrated in the Work of Two Twenty-First Century Italian Photographers.’ Immediations, 3: 2 (2013)
Research interests
- Dress, fashion and the clothed body
- Latin American photography and film
- Latin American fashion cultures
- The nuances and complexities of representation
- The politics of globalisation
- Visual and material cultures in global contexts
- Local and global intersections in fashion and photography
- Embodiment and sensory perception