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seven billion people in the world we all have one thing in common every day we all get dressed welcome to
April Callahan
dressed the history of fashion a podcast where we explore the who what when of why we wear what we are fashion historians and your hosts april callahan
Cassidy Zachary
and cassidy zachary dress listeners while american dress listeners i should say i wager to bet that many of you have learned the same version of us history that i did in grade school that april did in grade school that people have been learning for a very long time and it usually begins with the familiar song in fourteen ninety two columbus sailed the ocean blue well christopher columbus is of course the famed italian explorer credited with quote unquote discovering america i of course use discovering ironically as we should all know by now that he did not discover anything millions of indigenous people had inhabited the lands now known as the quote unquote america for thousands upon thousands of years before columbus and explorers after him claimed them in the name of the spanish monarchs queen isabella the first and king ferdinand ii in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries
April Callahan
yes and columbus first made landfall in present day bahamas on the island of guanahani the indigenous homeland of the taino people from there he traveled to modern day cuba and the island of hispaniola which today is comprised of the dominican republic and haiti and then to the eastern coast of central america and the northern tip of spain south america and columbus's voyages were instrumental in laying the literal foundation for spain's subsequent centuries long colonization and occupation of south central and north america the colonizers brought many things with them including spanish culture religion and dress but also devastatingly disease and the effects of colonization that still resonate in all of these countries to this very day you know we're seeing a lot of this evidence presently by the continued protest against the columbus monuments present in these countries and also the very celebration
Cassidy Zachary
of columbus day and as our listeners know i am of course interested in the relationship between fashion and colonialism and i am studying it in relationship to the history of my home state new mexico with grapples with a very long spanish and then anglo american colonial past that extends back five hundred years so not a not a short period by any means and the clothed body is this incredibly potent site for the studies of the way in which identities were negotiated within the colonial context and especially as they relate to the intersections of gender race and class the spanish colonial world itself is a subject right for interrogation on these topics which is why we are so pleased to welcome today's guest to the show and that is fashion historian laura beltran rubio whose research explores the construction of identity through fashion in europe and latin america with an emphasis on the early modern spanish world
April Callahan
laura is a doctoral candidate at the college of william and mary in williamsburg virginia and her dissertation explores the adoption and adaptation of european fashions their fusion with local indigenous elements of dress and their representation in portraits and pictures which were produced in the viceroy of new granada which was the representative of spain's south american empire and she joins us today for part one of our two part episode during which we discuss her research on spain's imperial curio de la moda or empire of fashion laura a warm welcome to dressed laura welcome to
Cassidy Zachary
dressed it's such a pleasure to have you here with us today hi kassity
Laura Beltran Rubio
thank you it's a pleasure for me to be here i have been listening to and learning from dressed for a very long time so it's really an honor being here yeah and i've been
Cassidy Zachary
following your work and research for some time too so i'm excited to connect and learn more about what you are researching and your work focuses on fashion and self fashioning in the eighteenth century spanish american colonial territory of new granada which is modern day colombia ecuador panama and venezuela but before we dive into this rich topic i would love if you could first kind of set the scene for our listeners when did the spanish first come to the continent now known as south america it was certainly not known as south america prior to the spanish and who and what did they find there that made them want
Laura Beltran Rubio
to see stay so the spanish invasion of south america was actually one of the very first colonial enterprises in what we now know as the americas and the spaniards actually were some of the first europeans to come here in this history of colonialism the spaniards arrived in what is now venezuela panama and colombia at the turn of the sixteenth century so very early on and they found it and named their first cities during their first explorations but many of them were later abandoned they came in founded a city then found a better place for their cities and so they left and it wasn't until fifteen fifteen that cumana the first sort of permanent city was founded in the territory of present day venezuela this was the first city that was found in what they first called tierra firme which is in a super super simplified version of the story what later became the viceroyalty of neo gr and they also founded another city in present day colombia that was very important called santa maria lantigua deltarien that one was founded in fifteen thirteen but that one was later abandoned the actual viceroyalty of the neo granada which is the territory or the colony that i study wasn't created until the eighteenth century and its history is super complicated and probably takes more than just a few minutes to talk about it or explain it clearly but it was created as a result of what are called the bourbon reforms which came about with the new monarchy in spain the habsburgs used to rule the spanish empire until the end of the seventeenth century and at the beginning of the eighteenth century the bourbons the same french bourbons came to claim i guess the spanish crown and so these reforms they were a sort of reaction of an empire that was basically disintegrating and they were trying to reclaim the empire and reorganize the empire so these reforms included some that were more social some that were more political and some even economic or with economic intentions and so the viceroyalty of new granada was a product of all of this it was officially founded in seventeen seventeen and it was later dissolved because they decided that it was too expensive and too complicated and in the seventeen thirties it was founded again and this time it was kind of permanent and the viceroyalty of new granada existed until it became independent from the spanish empire in the nineteenth century yeah and the
Cassidy Zachary
spanish empire was quite vast i mean they founded these colonies that you're talking about around the same time they were also up cortez was in mexico moving up north into what is present day new mexico texas kind of all those southern united states territories so it was an incredibly vast empire and i'm just curious how similar the south american colonies were to other spanish colonial enterprises for instance in like mexico cortez came they subjugated the indigenous populations they enslaved them as laborers and then they just started really looking for the nation's resources i'm just curious if you can talk a little bit more about what resources they found in south america that made them
Laura Beltran Rubio
want to stay yeah they i think colonial enterprises are at the basis just pretty much the same always right so i have an undergraduate degree in economic history actually and i do think about colonization in economic terms i just i can't avoid it so in summary i think about the invasion and colonization of the americas as this way that the europeans found to sort of shift their entire productivity output because they found all of these resources that they no longer had in europe and these include of course some sort of basic natural resources including water and wood for their ships for example but it includes also precious goods and luxury goods things like gold and gems and of course human labor and i think knowledge indigenous knowledges are very important for science now and we don't really realize that again because they were erased of the history in south america specifically there were a lot of natural pigments and plants that were used for medicines for example and through the development of medicines they found foods such as corn or potatoes and they found silver and i think silver was a very very big part of the narratives of colonization or why colonization was important there was gold as well lots of gold and there was this quest for this super rich gold mine that they thought that they would find called the legend of el dorado which they thought that was actually in the territories of the muisca which were in what later became the viceroyalty of new grenada and in the central area of present day colombia and this legend of el dorado sort of shift because as they were going through different places and realizing that they couldn't find it they said that it was somewhere else but this quest for gold and wealth i think in general was what kind of fueled this colonial enterprise i think yeah it's super
Cassidy Zachary
interesting because in my own research as you know i'm studying spanish colonialism in north america and of course they were also looking for the seven cities of cibola which was this storied city that was supposedly all gold right it was a city built out of gold so it's really interesting how those kind of myths and legends play into justifying these colonial enterprises
April Callahan
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Cassidy Zachary
i'm curious do you know anything of the dress practices of the indigenous people the spanish encountered i know there's been books written about this but if you have any insight into it i'm sure we'd love to learn a
Laura Beltran Rubio
little bit more i do i must say though that i'm definitely still learning and i think there's still a lot of work to be done on this matter and one of the biggest problems that we have is that we tend to speak about indigenous culture as this sort of big homogenous mass and they are not there are a lot of different cultures and we should recognize them individually and their own dress expressions individually as well in the different cultures different people so we should try to move away from this sort of like homogenic approach but at the same time i think this larger approach of grouping cultures has produced some really interesting research i think and that's where my knowledge comes from because i of course i am very interested in indigenous fashion but this is not what my research focuses on so of course i have to learn from others in latin america we know about the dress precisely of some of these largest indigenous cultures cultures like the aztecs the maya in south america specifically we know about the inca and the inca were particularly important in south america because they formed the largest empire of the region which they called the tawantin suyu and it spread from what is present day colombia all the way down to chile so basically the entire continent especially on or around the mountain ranges of the andes and because they were such a large empire and they conquered all andean peoples they also incorporated a lot of cultural elements from other cultures as well and so we can speak about some shared elements of andean cultures that we can see in the inca or in the dress of the inca and so these include super highly technological weaving techniques that resulted in very fine textiles with very dense counts of fibers with very sort of like invisible finishings if we could speak about that and textiles were also very very important among other things because they started to be made before ceramics which is quite rare and so scholars of the ancient andes have talked about this textile primacy that existed there because textiles were basically the primary means of culture and they were super important and of course these textiles were used for a number of different arts but they were also used for dress and so in dress we see a very strict hierarchical structure in which people were supposed to basically dress for their rank and so only the nobles so to speak had access to the finest textiles which were often made of the wool from alpacas or camo leads in general such as llamas and picunhas they were sometimes combined with cotton too and cotton is interesting because we tend to think that cotton wasn't present or produced in the americas until the nineteenth century but this is definitely a north america centric story because cotton was indigenous to the andes and so cultures pre hispanic cultures like the inca were already planting and cropping cotton and using it for their textile production and then their garments were not tailored like spanish or european garments they were made using lengths of fabric that could be wrapped sometimes sewn together to form these garments but they were not tailored they were not cut to form garments men in general were a sort of tunic that was in quechua the official language of the inca it was called unku women wore another sort of tunic like garment wrapped around their bodies and held together with belts that they called chumbi and pins and they wore a sort of mantle around their upper bodies called and so even though men and women had these generic garments they again dressed differently according to their rank and so the motifs in the textiles for example varied the pigments with which textiles were dyed also varied so for example for red textiles archaeologists have found that the elites seem to have used cogenil dye which was imported from mesoamerica while the more i don't want to say lower ranks but the more sort of common people used annatto and other dyes that were found more commonly locally and so to move away from the inca just very briefly in present day colombia the largest sculptures were the chibcha cultures which include the muisca and the guani that are the ones that we know the most about and their garments have very similarities with the inca so again they used the lengths of fabric to create the garments instead of tailoring them they also wore in general sort of tunics and mantles garments wrapped around their bodies in layers as well because the temperature can vary a lot in the andes it can be really warm when it gets sunny and then when the sun goes down especially in the early morning later in the evening it gets really cold so there are a lot of layers and they also used a lot of cotton again because cotton was native to south
Cassidy Zachary
america wow that is incredibly fascinating and i'm happy that you brought up tailoring versus not tailoring because when you talk about tailoring you're talking about cutting into the fabric and the fact that these cultures valued their fabric so very much that they wouldn't cut into it but they would actually use it in its fullest expression really speaks to that central role like you said that textiles played in these different cultures and it's also just super fascinating to study these diverse dress practices to learn about them i mean obviously that could be an entire podcast in itself and then once the spanish come studying this cultural collision through the dress body so bringing us back to the spanish fashionable dress was an incredibly important and an integral component of spanish identity and status and they worked really hard to transfer that dress culture to the american colonies it's super interesting the scholar lyman johnson has actually written about how within thirty years of the spanish conquest of mexico in the sixteenth century they had already set up this sophisticated guild system of artisans including silk weavers and shoemakers and i'm curious was there a similar process in new granada
Laura Beltran Rubio
yes yes of course the process was very similar in all of the different spanish colonies i think in part because the spaniards were trying to bring their own culture to the new colonies that they were finding and so the pre hispanic cultures in the andes they also had very rigid hierarchical structures that were based on on dress so this was something that they shared with the spaniards and then they also had textile manufacturing technologies that the spaniards put into use as they established their colonies and their cities and so that's where the guilds come in and they start creating all of these guilds and in the city of quito for example which was founded in the sixteenth century the tailor's guild was one of the first guilds to be created there so this was super important and as you mentioned guilds were specialized and so we have the tailor's guild but then we also have guilds of weavers of embroiderers of shoemakers and they all work together to create fashion and this is a whole system of production and trade also a system where artisans get trained and tailors and weavers they all get trained and in the case of south america and i'm pretty sure this extends to the entire spanish american colonies many of the people that formed these guilds were indigenous artisans or they had indigenous heritage and we also see that so that's this sort of like racialized components is definitely an important part of the guild system and the networks that are built through guilds and
Cassidy Zachary
i'm curious you mentioned that they incorporated some of the indigenous technologies do you know what those are specifically i don't
Laura Beltran Rubio
know the technologies specifically but in the inca empire for example they had this structure of workshops where women especially and i think it's questionable if it's just women or if this is the tale that we were told by the colonizers but women were trained to become specialized weavers that made the finest textiles for the inca emperor and i think the history says that these women were the prettiest women the most valuable and that they were also virgins which inevitably makes me think of women in a convent also engaging with needlework and so this kind of structure i don't know how exact it was the adoption by the spaniards but we see a sort of parallel there and then we also see indigenous textile artists were in general just very good weaving different things and using their materials which included cotton that was highly valued by the spaniards and so they were put to work in there and then they even though in the andes they used alpaca wool before the spaniards came in they could also use sheep's wool which the spaniards brought with them so i think in general their labor was put into use and probably technologies as well but i don't know specific technologies that were put into use
Cassidy Zachary
as well no that was a great answer and they're highly valued skills like you said more with laura after a brief sponsor break
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Cassidy Zachary
welcome back so laura it is really amazing to consider just how the wealthy upper class in new granada maintained this fashionable appearance maybe months behind the quote unquote latest trends in europe but still in tune with those trends or those dress practices nonetheless and it's incredibly remarkable when you just consider how they were getting their garments and textiles and knowledge it's this trade in luxury goods that spanned the globe and these ships are traveling from china to the philippines to new granada and onto europe and back again i mean it's really incredible and i'm hoping you can talk about these sophisticated trade networks that brought fashionable luxury goods to this south american spanish colony
Laura Beltran Rubio
of new granada well as you mentioned the world was incredibly globalized there and i think well you also mentioned early how vast the spanish empire actually was so the spanish empire or the spanish i guess just used their networks in the different parts of the empire to be able to trade and so they even had ports in manila in the philippines that became colonies of the spanish empire as well so their empire just basically spanned the entire world and so they use this and in the sixteenth century they established a trading route that would go periodically from manida to some ports in the americas including acapulco in present day mexico portoello in panama and calliao in peru so ships were coming with goods from asia to these ports and then they were technically they were supposed to just cross over to the atlantic and be shipped directly to europe and to spain especially because they carried very luxurious goods from china that the spanish emperor and the people around him his court they believed that americans did not deserve these luxuries and they didn't have the right to these luxuries and so they should not consume that but in real life many of these things actually remained in the americas people consumed them in the americas some of it was muggled i'm not sure that everything was actually smuggled and not only did they stay in the americas but then also these goods that came from asia and that came from europe because the route also went the other way around they also inspired the production of different luxury goods of course including textiles in the americas so for example we have evidence that calicoes were produced in the americas there are some workshops that we know of in i think in mexico more specifically than in south america and they produced what were called indianillas in spanish but it's basically calicos or like chintz textiles and of course they vary the quality is not the same the motifs are not exactly the same but they're inspired on these textiles that were being produced in asia we also have for example ceramics from puebla that tried to imitate this blue and white asian ceramic production and they were again different but inspired by this and so globalization i think went beyond just the goods coming from different places and america being a sort of huge market for those goods but in a way the americas also became a sort of melting pot of cultures where all of these tastes including indigenous american tastes got together and so that gave i think a lot of creativity for design and the arts in general more than just fashion yeah
Cassidy Zachary
and something i find super fascinating too is that the exquisite fringed and embroidered manila silk shawl that i'm sure many of our listeners are familiar with is synonymous with hispanic dress but it is in fact chinese in origin which is super interesting also because manila is a city in the philippines but it's all connected and i'd love if you could speak a little bit about how this accessory in particular is particularly emblematic of the transatlantic trade culture and its really seismic impact on dress practices around the
Laura Beltran Rubio
globe yeah i think the manila shawl or manton de manila as we call it in spanish i think it's it basically embodies all of this transatlantic and trans pacific trade cultures of the early modern world because as you say it has just everything in it it came to signify spanish culture and flamenco dancers still use it as part of their performances and as part of their dance but as you rightly mentioned it's called manton de manila which is in philippines but then it uses chinese silk and many times figuratively speaking it's designed with orientalist flower motifs but many times it has also scenes of asian people often sitting at what seem to be more like japanese gardens with pagodas and things like that so it's really multicultural all in just one object which i think is fascinating and then the other thing that they have that i've been thinking a lot about but i don't think think i have a definitive answer for this is the macrame borders the sort of the fringe that it has because i think in a way macrame is also related to the arabic heritage that was part of spain for a very long time especially southern spain which is probably what we think where most of the people that moved to the americas came from and so this sort of decorative knot tying has been traced to the first centuries of the common era in china but then it was also a very important part of arab textile production later on and especially in the thirteenth fourteenth centuries so i wonder if there's something to say about that like that's another culture that was very important for the spanish empire that i think we can see reflected in other things just like tile work or azulejos and i wonder if that also made its way into the manton de manila but i think in short what i want to say here is that the manila like you say i think just basically encapsulates all of this huge empire and huge trade networks in just one garment and that's why it's so important and
Cassidy Zachary
fascinating i think and people might not know this but the moroccans actually occupied spain up until basically right before or maybe it's the same year i don't know off the top of my head when columbus sailed you know the ocean blue have you the moroccans were kicked out at that same era so yeah the influence is undeniably there i visited spain a couple years ago and you can go to the south of spain and see all of the wonderful architecture and learn more about that history too but it's super interesting do you know if those shawls were produced first in china or were they just made with chinese silk within the spanish empire i
Laura Beltran Rubio
actually don't know and i think this is also where history gets really confusing because of course we have all of these myths and unfortunately the history of dress and i would say the spanish empire generally hasn't been very thoroughly studied so we still have a lot of information that's not i don't want to say that it's not accurate but that we still need to like confirm and
Cassidy Zachary
double check april i'm going to go ahead and second laura on that observation there is so much more research to be done on dress in the spanish american empire but scholars like laura are actively working to change that with their research into understudied areas and understudied topics and there's so many more fascinating things to uncover be sure and join us thursday where we learn more about laura's own research into the dress practices found in the eighteenth century spanish american colonial territory of new granada in the meantime
April Callahan
head over to imperiodomoto dot com and that is spelled i m p e r i o d e m o d a imperiodemoto dot com to learn more about laura's fascinating work on fashion consumption and representation in spanish colonial america you can also find more of laura's work on the fashion and race database where she is a researcher as well as at culturasdemoto dot com the digital humanities project she co directs that is bringing fashion studies related content to spanish speakers and she also has her own podcast so be sure and check it out if you are a spanish speaking dress listener and spread the word well
Cassidy Zachary
that does it for us today dress listeners may you consider the sartorial legacy of spanish colonial america next time you get dressed
April Callahan
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Cassidy Zachary
remember we always love hearing from you so if you'd like to write to us you can do so at hello at dressedhistory dot com dressedhistory dot com is also our website where you can sign up for our monthly newsletter our in person tours and online fashion history courses and you can check out whatever else we have up our finely tailored
April Callahan
sleeves we get so many questions from you all about our recommendations for fashion history books so if you are interested you can always find a link in our show notes to our bookshop bookshelf so that address is bookshelf shop dot org shop dressed and there you can find over one hundred and fifty of our favorite fashion history titles and do
Cassidy Zachary
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you as always for tuning in and more dressed coming your way very soon the history of fashion is a production of dressed media
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Episode: Imperio de la Moda: Spain's Empire of Fashion with Laura Beltrán-Rubio, Part I (Dressed Classic)
Date: February 27, 2026
Host(s): April Callahan & Cassidy Zachary
Guest: Laura Beltrán-Rubio (fashion historian, College of William & Mary)
In this Dressed Classic episode, hosts April Callahan and Cassidy Zachary welcome fashion historian Laura Beltrán-Rubio to discuss the "Empire of Fashion" created during Spain’s colonization of the Americas, with particular focus on the Spanish colonial viceroyalty of New Granada (now Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela). The episode explores how dress and fashion intersected with colonialism, identity formation, social hierarchies, indigenous dress practices, and global trade networks. This is part one of a two-part exploration.
Setting the Scene: Laura details how early Spanish colonies in present-day Venezuela, Panama, and Colombia were established at the start of the 16th century. Permanent colonial cities, like Cumaná (Venezuela, 1515) and Santa María la Antigua del Darién (Colombia, 1513), became footholds for further expansion.
Bourbon Reforms: She explains that the viceroyalty of New Granada was only officially established in 1717 in the context of 18th-century Bourbon reforms designed to revitalize Spain’s declining empire.
“The viceroyalty of New Granada was a product of all of this… officially founded in 1717… existed until it became independent from the Spanish empire in the nineteenth century.”
— Laura Beltrán-Rubio ([08:52])
Resources Targeted: Laura, with her economic history background, analyzes colonization as a means for Europe to access new resources—natural (water, wood), luxury (gold, gems, pigments, silver), labor, and knowledge.
Myths to Justify Conquest: Legends like El Dorado fed colonial appetites and “justified” exploitation.
“This quest for gold and wealth... fueled this colonial enterprise.”
— Laura Beltrán-Rubio ([11:59])
Rejecting Homogeneity: Laura cautions against lumping all Indigenous dress together, emphasizing rich diversity.
Andean Textile Primacy: She describes the Incan and broader Andean cultures’ highly technological weaving traditions, with “very fine textiles, very dense counts of fibers”—demonstrating both artistry and social hierarchy.
“Textiles were basically the primary means of culture and they were super important...
In dress we see a very strict hierarchical structure in which people were supposed to basically dress for their rank.”
— Laura Beltrán-Rubio ([17:03])
Transplanting European Fashions: Spanish colonizers fostered European-style clothing industries—including the guild system of tailors, weavers, embroiderers, and shoemakers—across their colonies.
Indigenous Involvement: Many guild members were Indigenous or of Indigenous descent, with colonial economies leveraging native textile skills and materials (e.g., cotton, eventually sheep’s wool after its introduction by Spaniards).
“The tailor's guild was one of the first guilds to be created... Many were indigenous artisans or had indigenous heritage.”
— Laura Beltrán-Rubio ([23:01])
Globalized Trade Networks: The Spanish empire’s vast reach facilitated a global circulation of luxury goods—textiles and garments flowed between China, the Philippines (Manila), the Americas, and Europe.
Smuggled Luxuries: Despite legal restrictions, Asian luxury textiles remained in American colonies, inspiring local imitations (calicoes/“Indianillas,” Puebla ceramics).
Melting Pot of Styles: Colonies became spaces for creative blending of European, Asian, Indigenous, and African aesthetics.
“America became a sort of melting pot of cultures where all of these tastes... got together and that gave... a lot of creativity for design and the arts.”
— Laura Beltrán-Rubio ([31:40])
Cultural Synthesis: The iconic fringed silk shawl (Manton de Manila), now a symbol of Spanishness and flamenco, actually originated from Chinese silk, featured Asian motifs, and may have absorbed influences from Arab traditions.
Multicultural Object: This accessory—named for Manila yet Chinese in origin, with Arabic techniques—epitomizes the entanglement of trade, fashion, and identity.
“It basically embodies all of this transatlantic and transpacific trade… It came to signify Spanish culture… but as you rightly mentioned… it uses Chinese silk… It’s really multicultural all in just one object which I think is fascinating.”
— Laura Beltrán-Rubio ([33:02])
Speculation on Techniques: Laura wonders if the macramé fringe has links to Arab or Chinese knotting traditions, reflecting Spain’s own history of Islamic rule.
Need for More Research: Both Laura and Cassidy note that much remains to be studied and clarified regarding fashion and dress in the Spanish American empire.
“I think this is also where history gets really confusing... the history of dress and... the Spanish empire generally hasn't been very thoroughly studied.”
— Laura Beltrán-Rubio ([36:00])
"I think about the invasion and colonization of the Americas as this way that the Europeans found to sort of shift their entire productivity output because they found all of these resources that they no longer had in Europe... and of course human labor."
— Laura Beltrán-Rubio ([10:18])
"Textiles were also very important—among other things, because they started to be made before ceramics, which is quite rare... scholars of the ancient Andes have talked about this textile primacy that existed there."
— Laura Beltrán-Rubio ([16:18])
"The tailor's guild was one of the first guilds to be created there, so this was super important."
— Laura Beltrán-Rubio ([23:01])
"America became a sort of melting pot of cultures where all of these tastes, including Indigenous American tastes, got together."
— Laura Beltrán-Rubio ([31:40])
"The Manton de Manila basically encapsulates all of this huge empire and huge trade networks in just one garment and that's why it's so important and fascinating."
— Laura Beltrán-Rubio ([34:16])
This episode offers a dynamic, engaging, and deeply researched exploration of Spanish colonial fashion, global circulations of luxury, the politics of dress, and the enduring legacies of imperial history. A must-listen for fashion historians, cultural scholars, and anyone interested in how clothing shapes—and is shaped by—empire, culture, and identity.