John Soluri's "Creatures of Fashion"

John Soluri is associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia and reported the following:

Given the crowd with whom Ford Madox Ford reputedly ran, I suspect that neither he nor most run of the mill readers would be deeply moved by reading page 99 of Creatures of Fashion. Given that I am an academic historian not Hemingway, I felt compelled to hook readers on page 1; so, dear (potential) readers, please begin my book at the beginning!

That said, page 99 invokes some of the book’s major themes:

The people who worked on estancias were overwhelmingly men, but men did not form a majority of the workforce. Horses and dogs usually outnumbered people and they played critical roles in ensuring the reproduction of sheep. Men formed close bonds with dogs and horses, often bestowing them an individuality, including names, denied to sheep.

These sentences describing the “multispecies” workforce typical of sheep ranches in early twentieth-century Patagonia, address the quotidian entanglements of the lives of people and animals. These kinds of entanglements are examined throughout Creatures of Fashion whose narrative arc traces the consequential transformations of diverse and divided people due to the commodification of wild and domesticated animals whose furs, fibers, and feathers became commodities. The trade in animal furs and fibers helped to bankroll the settler colonial projects of central governments in Argentina and Chile, while integrating Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego into sprawling networks of investors, workers, animals, and goods.

Page 99 conveys a glimpse of the story more or less at its midpoint, when the wool industry’s importance supplanted that of nineteenth-century trades in furs and feathers—principally from fur seals, guanacos (a camelid related to llamas) and rheas. Sheep ranching in Patagonia, as in many other parts of the world, involved the violent removal of Indigenous foragers and hunters who maintained different kinds of relationships with animals than those that formed between settlers and animals. One critical difference that I alluded to on page 99 is the taken-for-granted need to control the reproduction of animals in order for them to become—and remain—livestock.

Two important aspects of Creatures of Fashion that are absent from page 99 include the role of fashion markets in driving demand for the furs and fibers from animals in Patagonia, and the concomitant rise of wildlife conservation and tourism in Patagonia during the second half of the twentieth century. Calling attention to the transboundary forces that transformed Patagonia is one of the book’s main innovations that is best appreciated by taking a deeper dive.

Learn more about Creatures of Fashion at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue