Decolonial Fashion Ethnography: ‘before Yesterday’ Method

Decolonial fashion ethnography: ‘Before Yesterday’ method is based on the the biographical documentary “Antes de Ontem” (2019) by Afro-Brazilian director Caio Franco. I have been exploring the idea that dress and fashion not only evolve in terms of shapes, silhouettes, colours and textiles (Medrado 2019), but also that they manage to naturalize the white gaze and cultural racism. The biographical documentary “Antes de Ontem” helped me to learn about the thick and sensitive layers of coloniality in clothing and how it shapes our social reality and imagination when we examine Brazil or countries that speak Portuguese in the African continent, such as Angola. In the documentary, we see the everyday clothes of an Afro-Brazilian working-class family, which is rarely addressed and framed as a fashion or scholarly subject. This portrayal highlights the coloniality of dress and how it manages our perceptions of people, their cultures, and their everyday lives. Antes de Ontem’s script serves as a metaphor for the movements and actions necessary to gear a decolonial approach towards taboo subjects, such as race in fashion and the binarism that still wrapping Brazilian social sciences scholarship on fashion subject. The method involves twenty articulations (attentions to education, as Tim Ingold reminds us) that one conducting qualitative research in Africa and its Diasporas should take. By doing so, we will begin making visible the invisible while challenging the dominance of Eurocentric ideas and practices in the research process, offering alternative perspectives and approaches while enabling new perspectives and methodologies to engage on social-historical, cultural, political, and economic forces that shape the field and to promote a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of fashion and its role in shaping cultural identities and subjectivities.