About the Book
Today Andean-Peruvian fashions grace the catwalks of global runways and adorn magazine covers from Vogue to Harper’s Bazaar. Renowned designers like John Galiano and Naeem Khan produce Andean-inspired collections, sometimes collaborating with Indigenous Peruvian artisans. As the world’s largest producer of sustainable alpaca wool and home to a large Indigenous manufacturing workforce, Peru has become a hub for ethical fashion markets. In Moral Fibers, Patricia Alvarez Astacio examines how representations of Indigeneity become fashionable and how Peruvian alpaca wool supply chains are made “ethical” even as they sustain structures of inequality. The book explores how national histories of race, racism, and violence shape how the supply chain operates in relation to the bodies, aesthetics, skills, materials, and images of marginalized Indigenous communities, and how Indigeneity is, in turn, reimagined as a cosmopolitan part of a multicultural Peru.