Aesthetics of Complicity: Race, Gender, and the Coloniality of Beauty in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Fashion Media

• In Event: 21061 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Media, Art, and Culture

Abstract

This paper examines how post-revolutionary Mexican fashion magazines from the 1940s and 1950s reinforced racial, gendered, and class hierarchies through beauty standards and consumer culture. Using Lugones’s (2024) framework of coloniality of gender, I analyze how these publications positioned mestizaje as a national ideal while privileging whiteness and Occidental aesthetics. I analyze how fashion media functions as a mechanism of social discipline, shaping Mexican femininity through racialized aesthetics and consumer desire.
Through an analysis of advertisements from La Familia (1946), I demonstrate how beauty norms were not only racialized but also commodified—positioning whiteness as aspirational and Indigeneity as an aestheticized artifact of cultural authenticity. The juxtaposition of Eurocentric fashion imagery with Indigenous representations in commercial advertising reveals the complicities of fashion media in sustaining colonial racial orders. Drawing on postcolonial feminist scholarship, I explore how these magazines contributed to the racialized governance of modern Mexican femininity and the construction of national identity through consumerism.
Situating Mexican fashion media within broader feminist and critical race discourses, this study interrogates how beauty, race, gender, and class intersect in Mexican print culture. By revealing the entanglements of aesthetics, consumer capitalism, and racialized femininity, this paper contributes to discussions on the persistence of coloniality in contemporary identity formation.

Author

• Isabelle Zazueta, University of Illinois