UC Santa Barbara

This paper uses visual and material culture analysis of garments, marketing materials, and exhibitor booths as well as textual analysis of online discourse to unpack the cultural sensibilities of Chicanx streetwear fashion designers. I argue that what I term, paisa aesthetics, are mobilized to visually disrupt how race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship are aesthetically understood in mainstream fashion narratives and challenge normative ideas of Mexicanidad. By reclaiming and queering paisa, these designs center Mexican American nostalgia, working-class lives, and the experience of first-generation migrants while simultaneously poking fun at illegality and racialized sexist tropes in high fashion/culture spaces. In addition, I argue that the cultural work that the fashion industry depends on is within a colonial capitalist logic that renders it as unorganized labor and decontextualized aesthetics. I examine the collections of Equihua and Paisa Boys to identify those cultural legacies and specificities that are lost in the process of consumption. Paisa aesthetics provides a vocabulary from which to understand the bicultural sensibility of Chicanx and Mexican communities in the U.S.