Amid Costumes and Points of Opposition:

Design, Embroidery and Resistance

Fernanda do Nascimento Cintra(B) and Cristiane Mesquita

Universidade Anhembi Morumbi, São Paulo, SP, Brazil

fernandancintra@gmail.com, cfmesquita@anhembi.br

Abstract. This article investigates the concepts of oppositional attire and opposi-
tional embroidery, seeking to relate them to fashion design and to politics. In addi-
tion to a temporal rendition, relevant changes in the ways of life that occurred in
the second half of the 20th century will be listed here, indicating their relationship
with clothes and embroidery. The concept of resistance will be outlined through
the production of contemporary subjectivity regarding costumes and embroidery
presented in two case studies. The first one features a clothing collection created
in 1971 by fashion designer Zuzu Angel from Minas Gerais during the Brazilian
civil-military dictatorship (1964–1985). The second one is situated in the political
backdrop of the 2010–2020 decade in the form of pamphlets embroidered by mem-
bers of the São Paulo collective Linhas de Sampa between the years 2018 and 2020.
The research focuses on oppositional clothing and embroidery in their potency as
dissonant narrative factors, insofar as they build expressive fields for questioning
social hegemony in their purpose of expanding the articulations between design
and politics.

Keywords: Fashion design · Design and politics · Opposition embroidery ·

Zuzu Angel · Linhas de Sampa

1 Introduction

Once ended the Second World War, capitalism intensified and persisted throughout the
20th century with the strengthening of variables such as globalization and technological
and communicational advances. Design is one of the fields in which such movements are
noticeable. According to Cardoso [1], its connections with other areas have promoted
new interrelationships throughout history. Design is sometimes articulated with politics,
positioned in different directions, now consonant, now dissonant with the hegemonic
powers – connections also observed in fashion design.
This article presents the outcomes of a master’s thesis [2] whose research covers
an investigation approaching the spheres of fashion design and politics, and focuses on
the concepts of oppositional attire and oppositional embroidery through two examples
that adopt qualitative analysis, field research, iconographic collection, interviews and
monitoring of actions on the web.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

A. C. Broega et al. (Eds.): CIMODE 2022, Advances in Fashion and Design Research, pp. 160–169, 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16773-7_14
 Amid Costumes and Points of Opposition 161

2 Costumes and Embroidery Amid Design, Politics, and Resistance

The first design processes were noticed around the 1930s [3]. However, the end of the
Second World War and the expansion of the western model of capitalist society brought
other needs, which implied social and ecological demands [4]. It was then that links
between design and other fields were intensified – the field of resistance among them.
For Michel Foucault [5], power relations are fundamental and trigger new manifestations
of resistance. Jesus [6] reflects on how design processes can operate to encourage political
actions capable of inserting themselves into everyday life, producing displacements and
creating new possibilities.
In the research that gave rise to this article, acts opposed to movements inscribed in
hegemonic systems, such as costumes, clothes, and artifacts, are considered resistance.
Elisabeth Wilson [7] calls ‘clothes of opposition’ the phenomena that promote dialogue
between clothing and movements of resistance: “Oppositional fashions are intended
to express dissidence or different ideas of a given group, or opinions hostile to the
conformist majority”.
Wilson’s concept is illustrated at different times (Fig. 1): in the position of women
in society during the Industrial Revolution and in the search for equal rights for emanci-
pated female clothing; in the zoot suit of the 1930s, reinforcing the identity of peripheral
African-American youth; in the ted costume, which revealed dissatisfaction with the con-
sumer society consolidated after the end of the Second World War, itself a protest against
conservatism, also perceived in the simplicity of the existentialist costume. And yet the
context of the student movements and the counterculture of the 1960s, in their search
for new ways of understanding the individual, community and nature while rejecting
the military-industrial complex [8], were materialized in the hippie cultural movement,
which refused dress codes imposed by the western society [8].
The approach of the opposition costume throughout history allows us to make an
analogy with Wilson’s concept, focusing on a technique widely used to counter hege-
monic sociopolitical contexts. This research focuses on times when embroidery assumed
this role.
The embroidery technique is used to adorn fabrics with needles, threads, or beads,
creating varied designs and patterns. It has been performed mostly by women throughout
history [9]. This research highlights some examples of expressive encounters between
embroidery and political resistance. To better understand and establish these relation-
ships in the context of embroidery production, we will use the concept of subversive
stitch proposed by Parker [9], here called ‘oppositional embroidery’: “[…] embroidery
is undoubtedly a cultural practice that involves iconography, style, and a social function
[…] in which embroiderers transform materials to produce meaning – and a whole range
of meanings – invariably noticed [9]”.
162 F. do Nascimento Cintra and C. Mesquita

Fig. 1. Clothes of opposition. Source: [10–14]

The connections between embroidery and resistance in the suffragette movement

banners allow us to identify an example of claim for the right to vote by women in
the early 20th century. The banner shown in Fig. 2 is an embroidery that displays the
phrase “deeds, not words”, with iris flowers, in contrast to the hammer and horseshoe,
characteristic tools of masculinity [9].

Fig. 2. Suffragette banner (1907). Source: Museum of London collection. Available at: [15]

Embroidery can be seen as a practice originally related to crafts; however, it is widely

used in the design field on a variety of products. The technique itself and some of these
 Amid Costumes and Points of Opposition 163

artifacts can be understood as products located between craft and design. Here, the focus
will be on the following two case studies.

3 Zuzu Angel and the Embroidery Behind the Scenes

of the Civil-Military Dictatorship
In the context of the articulations between resistance, oppositional outfits and opposi-
tional embroidery, this content especially addresses fashion design as a place that makes
up such connections. The displacement starts from the second half of the 20th century,
with the end of the Second World War (1945) and the presence of the Cold War (1945–
1991), and pierces the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship and its echoes in the social,
cultural and political spheres, shaped in the work of Brazilian fashion designer Zuzu
Angel (1921–1976).
Back then, in various parts of the world, student and counterculture actions emerged
with innumerous banners. The hippie movement (late 1960–1970) stands out, as well as
the movements against racial discrimination, gender inequality and the authoritarianism
of the Vietnam War (1959–1975), among others. The period stands out for the emergence
of new subjectivation processes, which can be synthesized as ways of being in any given
period [16]. In this scenario, between 1964 and 1985, Brazil lived under a civil-military
dictatorship, an authoritarian regime, mostly after the Institutional Act Nr. 5, which
intensified censorship from 1968 onwards, among other forms of control [17]. That
moment required the creation of countercultural languages capable of overcoming the
censors [18].
In the cultural production of the time, in articulation with voices of resistance such
as Zuzu Angel’s work, some pieces stand out: an example is the Portuguese natural-
ized Brazilian artist António Manuel (1947 -), who manipulated newspaper images,
emphasizing the recurrent violence in the student uprisings, as in his 1968 work (Fig. 3),
‘Repression again – here’s the balance’ [18].

Fig. 3. Work by António Manuel. Source: São Paulo Biennial Exhibition. Available at: [19]

Angel can be considered one of the main references in Brazilian fashion design,
primarily for clashing with current impositions and rejecting European standards in her
creation. She preferred raw materials and evoked Brazilian elements in her work.
Due to her son Stuart Angel’s involvement in the movements opposing the authori-
tarian regime, her trajectory was entangled in the political context of the country [20].
164 F. do Nascimento Cintra and C. Mesquita

The young student of Economics (1946–1971), one of the anti-government activists,

disappeared and was killed in May 1971 [21].
In August of the same year, the occurrence resulted in the creation of clothes in
protest, when Zuzu launched the International Dateline Collection IV – Holiday and
Resort in New York, with embroidered tunic-dresses in white cotton denouncing the
political and social situation provoked by the dictatorship. Despite their apparent sim-
plicity, the embroidery carried a deep symbolic charge. With military content, (Fig. 4)
they alluded to the crime of which Stuart had been victim, while other embroideries
illustrated children’s games and the prison (Fig. 5). The naif aesthetic was a design
strategy used to circumvent the imposed censorship [22].

Fig. 4. Embroideries of the tunic-dresses. Source: Documentary collection of the Zuzu Angel
Institute. Photos by the author.

Fig. 5. Embroideries of the tunic-dresses. Source: Documentary collection of the Zuzu Angel
Institute. Photos by the author.

Angel’s practices point to connections between fashion design and politics through
the embroidery technique, connections that can also be identified in the case study
presented hereafter.
 Amid Costumes and Points of Opposition 165

4 The Linhas de Sampa Collective and the Backstage of Their

Embroidery

Relating with Zuzu Angel’s work, the research moves towards the popular uprisings that
took place around the world in the years 2000, especially in the Brazilian context. The
focus goes deeper into the São Paulo Linhas de Sampa collective, with its embroidery
and actions in defense of human rights, problematizing minority agendas in the scenario
that has been consolidating over the last three decades.
The world has been facing crises since the beginning of this century, especially in
some countries that reproduce aspects of such imbalances. The popular uprisings of
the #OccupyWallStreet movement, the Arab Spring, and many others [23] took place
almost simultaneously around the globe. Images of the protests circulated widely, thanks
to the power of the internet and social media platforms, in a format that became known as
online activism [23, 24]. One of the fundamental elements for this purpose is the hashtag
(#), a prefix that promotes a grouping of data connected through hyperlinks – virtual
tools that agglutinate the same sentences and promote the summative visualization of
their use [25].
In Brazil, a series of manifestations emerged with different agendas in 2013. These
insurrections motivated the growth of activism linked to minority groups in the following
years, expanding the appearance of decentralized collectives [23]. Among the gatherings
that resulted from these actions is the Linhas de Sampa collective, which operates on
social networks and also on the streets of the city of São Paulo (SP).
Since 2013, many uprisings have been happening at the national level. Their
initial guidelines concentrated on the increase in transport rates under the hashtag
#naosao20centavos [26]. Environmental and feminist issues were in evidence in 2015,
based on the hashtags #PrimeiroAssedio [27] and #naofoiacidente, the latter related to
a violent leak from a mining waste dam in the city of Mariana, MG [28]. In 2018, the
murder of Rio de Janeiro councilor Marielle Franco (1979–2018) resulted in national
and international protests that reverberated in the hashtags #QuemMatouMarielle? and
#MariellePresente [29]. The events described above and many others aroused movements
in the social sphere. Among them is the work of the Linhas de Sampa collective, which,
for the last four years, has articulated design, embroidery, and politics in embroidered
textile pamphlets. This name is due to their potential for being informative, raising ques-
tions, defending minority causes and their distribution throughout the city in the form
of small flags that can be attached to clothes, backpacks, and purses.
The activities of the Linhas de Sampa collective started in 2018 with seven members.
Today, it houses more than 70 people with different occupations and a democratic colle-
giate, self-financed and without headquarters. They have their manifesto published on the
social network Facebook: “Linhas de Sampa is an autonomous left-wing, supra-partisan
group whose initiatives are independent of parties, other collectives, associations, unions
etc.” [30].
Its members meet monthly on Paulista Avenue, in São Paulo (SP) to embroider.
Besides, they participate in events with agendas aligned with their own.
In the streets and on social networks, the embroideries of Linhas de Sampa promote
reflections in favor of education, against social security reform, in defense of native
166 F. do Nascimento Cintra and C. Mesquita

peoples, of the Unified Health System, against police violence, in favor of the environ-
ment, of women’s struggles and in solidarity with the popular uprisings that took place in
Chile (Fig. 6), among other issues. During the Covid-19 pandemic, they maintained their
actions mostly in the networks, in favor of vaccination and the Unified Health System
(Fig. 7).

Fig. 6. Linhas de Sampa embroideries. Source: Photos by the author and Linhas de Sampa
collective Facebook page. Available at: [31]

Their pamphlets are illustrated with the technique known as free embroidery, through
risks transferred with carbon paper to the fabric [32]. Each piece measures 12 × 12 cm,
although they may sometimes take other shapes. The predominant stitch type is the
so-called back stitch. The fabric is highlighted by words, phrases, and drawings with
countless colors of thread, inks, three-dimensional elements, and the signature of the
Collective in stick-type letters.
 Amid Costumes and Points of Opposition 167

Fig. 7. Embroideries by Linhas de Sampa. Source: Linhas de Sampa collective Facebook page.
Available at: [31]

During the monitoring of a field action, other practices of the Collective were also
observed. Its members set up a kind of clothesline, where they hung pamphlets during an
event entitled Education Tsunami, which took place in São Paulo in August 2019 [33].
There, it was possible to witness the reaction of the protesters: curious, many people
approached and the clothesline became a kind of exhibition. There were more than 100
flyers hanging and after about an hour all had been distributed (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8. Monitoring of action by the collective Source: Photo by the author and Linhas de Sampa
collective Instagram page. Available at: [34]

5 Final Considerations
The investigative path presented in this article focuses on the concepts of oppositional
clothing and oppositional embroidery permeated by the concept of resistance. The review
derives from the observation of costumes and embroidery in approximations between
fashion design and politics. In the Brazilian milieu, the approach to the embroidery
panorama led us to these two case studies: the embroidery by Zuzu Angel in the period
of the civil-military authoritarian regime, and the pamphlets of the Linhas de Sampa
collective in the complex current scenario.
168 F. do Nascimento Cintra and C. Mesquita

Both studies promote articulations between the fields of design and political resis-
tance, emphasizing concrete matter permeated by embroidery as expressive means.
Building delicacy, both in technique and in result, Angel and Linhas de Sampa pro-
duce forces of struggle and combat: oppositional costumes and embroidery taken as
dissonant narratives create spaces that question the prevailing schemes of social hege-
mony. This research and its reverberations foster the establishment of design in the social
sphere as an agent of resistance.

Acknowledgements. The authors of this article wish to thank CAPES – Coordination for the
Improvement of Higher Education Personnel, a foundation linked to the Brazilian Ministry of
Education, for its support in the form of funding code 001.

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