Brás

Brás grew up around the railway — the station opened in 1867 became the gateway for waves of Italian immigrants who filled the district’s small factories and textile mills. What started as jute and cotton production hardened, over a century, into Brazil’s largest garment cluster: a dense grid of workshops, wholesalers, and subcontracted sewing rooms that still runs on family labor and inherited trade knowledge. Layer by layer, the neighborhood absorbed new arrivals — northeastern migrants in the 1940s, and later Korean and Bolivian communities — each reshaping the trade without erasing what came before. Today Brás is loud, fast, and largely unphotographed beneath its surface: this is where we start looking.