Kedron Thomas, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delaware. She is a cultural anthropologist with expertise in textiles, clothing, and fashion, especially the diversity of what people wear and how it is made. She is interested in the production of material culture, the cultural politics of style and identity, the globalization of trade and legal frameworks, cultural and ethical dimensions of entrepreneurship and business, race and ethnicity, and current environmental sustainability efforts in the fashion industry. Thomas’ research on clothing and fashion spans traditional textile production in the Guatemalan highlands, the manufacture and circulation of “knockoff” fashions in Central America, and the efforts of fashion industry professionals in the United States and United Kingdom to address pressing problems of environmental degradation and labor exploitation associated with global apparel supply chains.
Her first book, Regulating Style: Intellectual Property Law and the Business of Fashion in Guatemala (University of California Press, 2016), is based on long-term research with Indigenous Maya apparel manufacturers who make clothing that features unauthorized reproductions of fashion brands. She examines the rise of “knockoff” fashion in Central America amidst the politics of race and indigeneity, efforts by the Guatemalan state and international institutions to promote entrepreneurship and national development after nearly four decades of armed conflict, and the globalization of intellectual property regimes that criminalize practices of brand “piracy.” The book also broadens out to explore the neocolonial contours of the global fashion system. She argues that trademark law enforcement is an important part of how the fashion industry regulates style along the lines of race, class, gender and geography.
Her current book project describes the politics of environmental sustainability and labor rights from the perspectives of designers, marketers, and brand and supply chain managers at fashion and footwear firms in cities across the US and UK. Tentatively titled, Sustainability in the Making: Labor, Ethics, and Ecology in the Global Fashion Industry, the book narrates how fashion professionals are attempting to build more environmentally sustainable and ethical supply chains. Rather than gauging the economic or ecological efficacy of these efforts, her research has focused on the ways that evolving business strategies reflect the emergence of new and different social identities, relationships to materials and technologies, moral sentiments and commitments, and meanings of work and labor among white-collar employees. The project engages conversations on material culture and materiality, ecology and environmentalism, the meaning and practice of sustainability, changing urban landscapes and processes of gentrification, corporate ethics, and cultures of contemporary capitalism.
Since 2022, Thomas has been co-principal investigator on the ReSpool project, which brings together engineers, social scientists, and textile scientists and designers to tackle the problem of post-consumer fashion waste. Funded from 2022 to 2024 by a National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator award, ReSpool has made significant advances in building the community partnerships, technologies, and processes needed to enable textile-to-textile recycling in the Delaware Valley region. This project applies Thomas’ research findings on environmental sustainability efforts among fashion industry professionals to an interdisciplinary and engaged effort to build regional systems that ameliorate the uneven burdens of fashion overproduction.
Thomas earned a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University in 2012. Before joining the University of Delaware, she was associate professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.