Mi Medrado

Project Description Eparrei Oyá: Sensory Fashion Walk The Research Center for Social Sciences in Fashion – CiSoM presents the Eparrey Oyá! Sensory Fashion Walk, a collective walk that happened during the Saint Barbara & Iansã Orisha procession, an Afro-Catholic festivity at the historical center Pelourinho, on December 4, 2025, in Salvador, Bahia. Brazil, as a prominent member of the Global South and a core nation in Latin America, offers the opportunity to challenge the Western categorical binarism of fashion that seeks to delegitimize non-white clothing as minor 'fashion'. While the capital letter F means developed and modern, minor f stands for tradition-copy-clothing. However, what does modern versus traditional look like in 2025? Therefore, to decent and resist this notion that has informed Westernized theories, methods, practices, and policies of 'official' fashion, and based on the method of decolonial fashion ethnography, we walked. Cowrie shell divination at the Ilê Asè Obá Nire temple was consulted; thus, the experiment is being conducted with the spiritual permission of Iansã orisha. It was conceived as an open and collective work, from data collection (photographs, sounds, and film footage) to the Eparrey Oyá Fashion installation final production, which is a piece made with materials and elements that make up the worship and representation of Iansã and her religious encounter with Saint Barbara. We project videos and photographs, as visual accounts of narratives, followed by participants writing notes. We welcome you to the multisensory fashion experience felt during the walk by touching, gazing at, feeling, smelling, squatting, observing, and reflecting. With this practice, we share that fashion research can enhance forces for solutions to overcome challenges facing the fashion industry and circuits. For that, recognizing the fashion local system culture wires and their position in the fashion world system, informs the geopolitics of time and space. Walking, we found tradition, faith, and fast fashion. Bio Mi Medrado is a cultural economic anthropologist, editor, and decolonial activist. Her research practice fosters knowledge circulation and aims to elaborate on methodological tools for future fashion in and from the Global South. She is the principal investigator of the Research Center for Social Sciences in Fashion. Mi is part of the innovation and internationalization committee at the Brazilian Association of Fashion Studies and the Enclothed Knowledges: Practice-Based Fashion Research Network. She has lectured and conducted workshops at higher education institutions in Angola, Argentina, Germany, Canada, Brazil, the United States, France, the Netherlands, Uganda, and the United Kingdom.