Dr Tereza Kuldova
On the 1st of August 2014, Tereza Kuldova started a two year post-doctoral position at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo, Norway and joined the Enterprise of Culture project. As a social anthropologist specializing on South Asian fashion, design and craft, Tereza will provide the project with a view onto the emerging fashion centres in India and the Gulf, linking them through a case study of Swarovski fashion design crystals to Western luxury industries. Tereza will work alongside Principal Investigator, Véronique Pouillard Maliks.
Tereza Kuldova received her PhD in social anthropology from the University of Oslo, with the title Designing Elites: Fashion and Prestige in Urban North India in November 2013. Tereza has conducted a long-term ethnographic fieldwork with leading Indian fashion designers and their business elite clientele as well as with impoverished craftspeople in the embroidery cottage industry in New Delhi and Lucknow. She has followed the production of luxury fashion from poor neighbourhoods to posh designer studios and focused both on the material and immaterial production of prestige and heritage luxury and their functions in contemporary Indian market economy. She has analysed in detail the production of value in the aesthetic economy under the conditions of cultural capitalism as well as the ways in which dominant myths are (re)produced through fashion design and the ways in which India’s aesthetics of power is produced in an age dominated by fantasies of transnational muscular free markets, meritocracy and India’s global power. As such, the thesis analysed the reasons behind the obsession of the local elites with heritage luxury inspired by the maharajas, Gulf monarchies and the Mughal Empire, one that dismisses Western minimalism in favour of ornamentalism, bling and kitsch.
Among Tereza’s recent publications are edited volume Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism (Oslo: Akademika Publishing, 2013) and journal article ‘Fashionable Erotic Masquerades: Of Brides, Gods and Vamps in India’ (Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, vol. 3: 1&2, 2012), for more see Tereza’s profile at academia.edu. Tereza has also curated and designed an ethnographic museum exhibition Fashion India, which opened on the 13th of September 2013 at the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo. She is currently finishing her monograph to be published with Bloomsbury in 2015.
Tereza can be contacted at tereza.kuldova@iakh.uio.no or through her website http://www.tereza-kuldova.com/