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 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 particular interest in Latin American bodily practices and the intersection between dress, identity, representation and power.

Her monograph Fashion and the Devil's Railroad: Dress, Temporality, and Modernities in the Brazilian Amazon (forthcoming, 2026) examines the relationship between fashion, photography and the different temporal regimes of colonial modernity. 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. 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, dObra[s], Fashion Theory and Photoworks. 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. Further information on her research projects can be viewed at elizabethkutesko.com