Imperio de la Moda: Spain's Empire of Fashion with Laura Beltrán-Rubio, Part II (Dressed Classic)

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: Dressed: The History of Fashion
Episode: Imperio de la Moda: Spain's Empire of Fashion with Laura Beltrán-Rubio, Part II (Dressed Classic)
Airdate: February 28, 2026
Guests: Laura Beltrán-Rubio, art and fashion historian
Main Theme:
This episode continues the fascinating exploration of Spain's imperial influence on fashion in the 18th-century Spanish American colonies, focusing on the Viceroyalty of New Granada (modern-day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela). The hosts, April Callahan and Cassidy Zachary, welcome back Laura Beltrán-Rubio to discuss how clothing and portraiture reveal negotiations of identity, status, and cultural hybridity in colonial Spanish America. The episode also highlights Laura’s efforts to make Latin American fashion history accessible through digital humanities and Spanish-language outreach.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Importance and Complexity of Portraiture in Spanish America

• Portraits as Sources: Laura shares how portraits, while rare before the 18th century, became increasingly common and are critical in studying colonial fashions and social structures. However, access to South American colonial portraits, especially from New Granada, remains limited.
• Performance and Authenticity:
  • Portraits are understood as a performance of status, not always an accurate record of everyday dress, but “people were trying to make specific claims about who they were and how much money they had and how much access they had to these international trade networks.” (Laura, 06:44)
• Notable Example: The portrait pair of the Marqués and Marquesa de San Jorge (Bogotá) offers a case study of clothing details—such as extensive gold lace, identical watches, and abundant jewelry—depicting a uniquely local adaptation of global trends.
• Formulaic Structure: Portraits often include visual cues such as red velvet curtains, background city views, and inscribed cartouches detailing surname heritage and achievements—signaling Spanish bloodlines and elite identities (07:50–09:39).

Dress, Social Hierarchy, and the Casta System

• Dress as Status and Identity Marker: Luxurious clothing and accessories signified one's place in colonial society, particularly among the Creole (criollo) elite, who were of Spanish descent but born in the Americas.
• Racial and Gender Dynamics:
  • The caste system (Casta) sought to codify racial hierarchies, with dress regulating and sometimes transgressing those boundaries.
  • “Dress became a central aspect of the feminine identity. So it’s a strictly racialized society, but it’s also a strictly gendered society.” (Cassidy, 11:13)
  • Dress could facilitate moving between identities—legal cases hinged on testimony about whether someone "dressed like a Spaniard," blurring the lines between biological, legal, and social realities (13:30).
• Dress Regulations: Initially, Indigenous people were forbidden to wear Spanish clothing. Later, amid fears of rebellion, Spanish authorities required Indigenous populations to dress like Spaniards, highlighting the fluid but fraught role dress played in colonial control and resistance (14:38).

Regionally Distinct Garments and Hybridity

• Uniquely Local Garments:
  • Faldellín/Faldeguín: A calf-length, pleated skirt, hybridized from both Spanish and Andean dress, notable for being “scandalous” to Europeans and a marker of social and cultural negotiation among women in the Americas (19:08–22:44).
  • Pollera: Originally an undergarment or cage in Spain, in the Americas it became a fashionable outer skirt. The use and meaning shifted locally, raising questions about gender, virtue, and autonomy (22:51–23:58).
• Agency and Comfort: Women's choices (e.g., shorter skirts) may reflect greater autonomy and comfort relative to European gender norms, aligning with their somewhat broader legal rights in colonial society (23:58–24:30).

Methodology: Beyond Paintings to Archives and Textiles

• Multidisciplinary Approach: Laura goes beyond portraiture to study written documents (wills, inventories, court records) and the scant surviving garments and textiles.
• Surviving Garments:
  • Golden Waistcoat (Colonial Museum, Bogotá): Possibly woven with actual gold, reflecting both wealth and the limited extant examples.
  • Brocaded Men’s Garment (Museo de la Independencia): Pristine survivals are rare and tend to reflect elite men’s dress—raising questions on gendered preservation (25:34–30:00).
  • Stories from the archives, like that of Doña María Victorina Losa (a woman who embroidered and sold men’s waistcoats via her merchant husband), illustrate women’s active roles in fashion production.
• Archival Insights: Tax records, inventories, and complaints about shipment conditions provide real details on textiles’ value, practical issues (moths, water damage), and demand (broad interest in striped socks!), showing how integrated dress was into daily and economic life (30:15–32:04).

Reading the “Language of Dress”

• Cultural Fluency: Both men and women could “read” clothing, recognizing subtle distinctions in textiles and styles—a highly literate culture of material goods and status (31:22–32:04).

Religious Textiles and Fashion

• Overlap and Influence: Religious garments and ecclesiastical textiles were deeply luxurious and often absorbed donated “fashionable” items from laypeople, blurring the line between sacred and secular dress.
• Statues Dressed in Style: Sculptures of saints and especially the Virgin Mary were dressed in ways reflecting contemporary elite Spanish American dress, using donated jewelry and garments. This helps fashion historians infer what material culture looked like, sometimes better preserved than secular clothing (34:28–38:00).

Decolonizing and Democratizing Fashion Studies

• Making Knowledge Accessible:
  • Laura’s digital humanities project, Imperio de la Moda, aims to bring research to wider audiences in English and Spanish, using essays, images, and (aspirationally) multimedia approaches (38:00–39:49).
  • The Spanish-language podcast “Culturas de Mola” seeks to connect and bridge scholars and audiences in and from Latin America, emphasizing collaboration and reducing language barriers (39:53–43:50).
  • She is also active on the Fashion and Race Database and social media, striving to keep her research bilingual and accessible (43:50–44:17).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On portraits as performance:
  “Portraits is a performance. People were trying to make specific claims about who they were and how much money they had and how much access they had to these international trade networks.”
  — Laura Beltrán-Rubio (06:44)

• On dress and the casta system:
  “I do have trouble thinking that human intermixing is just pure math… So they are trying to separate all of these groups. And dress, of course, is a very important part of that separation. But it’s very difficult to, because, among other things, you can also pass as something that you are not.”
  — Laura (13:20)

• On archival “detective work”:
  “I realized I had all of these questions and I was like, I won’t be able to answer them by just looking at portraits for a year or by writing a paper. So this is basically my entire PhD project in a nutshell.”
  — Laura (25:41)

• On digital humanities and public access:
  “What I am trying to do is to write short sort of essays or like, interpretations of dress and images and portraits… I would like to include some audiovisual materials to make it even more accessible.”
  — Laura (39:53)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [02:49] Portraiture in New Granada: the Marquesas de San Jorge, formula of portraits, symbols of status
• [07:50] Portrait “formula”—props, cartouches, city views, heritage claims
• [09:39] Dress and status in casta society, racial and gender roles
• [13:20] Legal cases and “passing” as Spanish via dress
• [14:38] Clothing laws and dress as a tool of colonial control
• [19:08] Faldellín/faldeguín—hybrid, locally significant skirt
• [22:51] The Pollera—changing use and meaning in colonial society
• [25:34] Methodology: From paintings to archives to extant garments
• [30:15] Tax records and the reality of importing/storing fashionable goods
• [31:22] Archival evidence of the “language of dress”
• [34:28] Religious dress and its connection to fashionable textiles
• [38:00] Laura’s public scholarship: Imperio de la Moda and Culturas de Mola
• [43:50] Bridging English/Spanish scholarship, social media advocacy

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Final Thoughts & Takeaways

• Laura Beltrán-Rubio’s research reveals how 18th-century Spanish American dress reflected intricate negotiations of identity—across class, race, and gender—and how the clothing chatter of a colonial court was as sophisticated as that of any European capital.
• The distinction and hybridity of dress in New Granada underscores the broader story of how colonized and colonizer, Indigenous and European, crafted new forms of status and selfhood—often through the language and politics of clothing.
• Laura’s commitment to making Latin American fashion history visible and accessible marks an important intervention—bridging languages, regions, and audiences.

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For links to Laura Beltrán-Rubio’s projects (Imperio de la Moda, Culturas de Mola, Fashion and Race Database), see the episode’s show notes or Dressed’s social media.

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Transcript

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Please enjoy one of our favorite episodes from the Dressed archive of over 500 plus shows.

[E]

Over 7 billion people in the world. We all have one thing in common. Every day we all get dressed.

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Welcome to Dressed the History of Fashion, a podcast where we explore the who, what, when of why we wear. We are fashion historians and your hosts,

[E]

April Callahan and Cassidy Zachary. As promised, we are back with part two of our conversation with art and fashion historian Laura Beltran Rubio.

[B]

This is correct because on Tuesday, Laura introduced us to the sartorial beginnings of Spain's empire of fashion during the 16th and 17th centuries. And today we dive into her research into a very specific topic, the dress practices of people living in the 18th century Spanish American colonial territory of New Granada, which encompasses modern day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela. So let's just head on right back into Cass And Laura's conversation for more.

[E]

Laura, you've done a ton of research into how New Granada's wealthy elite negotiated their identities through the clothed body and through portraiture in the 18th century, which is a period of great social, political and economic change in the region. So can you please tell us about these portraits that you've taken as your archive and why they provide such a wealth of information about both the sitter and the dress culture of Spanish America at large?

[F]

Yes, I'm obsessed with portraits and the representations of dress in them, so I've definitely spent maybe too much time than I need to on them or looking at them. Portraits started to become more common in the Americas or in the Spanish Americas in the 18th century. Before then, they are very scarce. We're not really sure if it's because people were not having portraits made or if it's because they were just not taken care of and we no longer have access to them. And many of these portraits, the ones that we know are from Mexico, or I mean, were created in the New Spain, which encompass largely what is now Mexico and the southern territories of the United States. And many of them are in collections in Mexico and the United States. So getting access to portraits that are actually from South America is a little bit more difficult, especially if they come from the New Granada, which, again, was a small lived colony. It was much less wealthy than New Spain or Peru. But we still have some portraits, and one of them, or one of the best known actually portrait pair, is the portrait of the Marquesas de San Jorge, which was painted in what is now Bogota and is housed at the Colonial Museum in Bogota. He wears a typically French outfit of cassock, waistcoat and breeches. And she wears a dress that I still haven't really decided what it can be, because when I first looked at it, I think I was coming from these very Eurocentric sort of narrative of fashion history that tells us that French fashions came to Spain with the Bourbons, and then Americans or people living in the Americas adopted them as well. So I was like, oh, of course she's wearing by La Francaise, even if we don't really see the back of her gown. But it makes sense because she's sitting down, because some of the folds in the backs of those robes, a la Francaise, they were fitted enough so that from the front, you don't always see them, especially if people were sitting down. So that was my initial theory, but now I'm not, because it could be maybe a fitted back gown or it could be something completely different. That was used in the Americas and nowhere else. And that's still an open question. But what has made me rethink what she's wearing is because when you look closely at the details, you start seeing some things that you don't see anywhere else. So, for example, there's a lot of gold in her dress. And actually in her husband's dress, there's also a lot of gold or, like, golden details. And so there's some lace that seems to be golden, which is very interesting. She is wearing a lot of jewelry in her hair, in her. Like, her wrists, her bodies. So this is also interesting. And she's wearing two watches that look exactly the same, which to me is also quite rare, because you see people wearing chatelaines in Europe, but they have different things hanging. Usually they're not exactly the same, and hers are just the same. And so this is kind of different from what we're used to seeing in European portraits of the time. And even North American portraits of the time, especially of the English colonies, they are completely different and much more austere, so to speak. There's less gold and jewelry everywhere. And so I'm not trying to say here that we should take portraits as testaments of what people were wearing, because I think portraits is a performance. People were trying to make specific claims about who they were and how much money they had and how much access they had to these international trade networks. But they can tell us some things about how they understood fashion and how even people wore fashion in the streets or in special events, and that's where these details might come in.

[E]

And can you talk a little bit about the portraits themselves? Because it's super interesting how they follow a formula, in a sense. And I loved reading about, in one of your articles about how often the objects featured in these portraits relate to the sitter's identity, but also their social status. Can you just talk a little bit about that idea, like you said, of these portraits as a performance of their identity and status?

[F]

Yeah. There's this formula, as you call it, of the portraits that they. That the portraits follow. And so they usually have the sitter, which can be sitting or standing. Sometimes you see their whole body more frequently, I think, see from the knees up or hips up. And they are sometimes looking at you, not always. And then they are dressed in fashionable dress, even though it has, you know, its own meanings in the different contexts. They are dressed fashionably, and in many cases, they are surrounded by other objects, which can be. Well, I've spoken about the jewelry and the Watches, but you sometimes have red velvet curtains in the background. In Puerto Rico specifically, I've seen a lot of examples painted actually by Jose Campeche, which was one of the most famous portraitists of Puerto Rico. And you can see behind the sitter an open window that overlooks at the plaza of the city. And then they almost always have a cartouche with inscriptions that have the names and last names, several last names, because they want to show their heritage and their Spanish blood in there. And that's related with honor and class nobility in a way. Sometimes they state, if these people were inventor men, they say they were the viceroy, for example. And so basically just narrating their achievements and stating why they were so important. And this is written, of course, but then you can also see it in the actual objects that appear in the portraits, including dress.

[E]

And you write in one of the articles I read that quote, dress then came to signify status among an ideally rigid social hierarchy. And being dressed in luxurious clothes came to symbolize being a member of the new mixed race elites. And it's basically this performance of, of this distinctive criollo identity constructed through European dress, which I find fascinating because a lot of Latin American scholars do look at this, at the, the caste system and the role of dress in the caste system. Marisa Melendez has written about how dress was especially significant as a sign of cultural, racial and ethnic superiority, which is something I'm also looking at in my own research in Spanish colonial New Mexico. And this idea that colonizers really use their dress to assert their identity, but also, you know, their superiority to indigenous populations. And of course, this distinction between the Spanish and the indigenous or the African, quote, unquote, other, became increasingly complicated in Spanish colonies because they intermarried with indigenous people and people of African descent. And Spain tried to institute this super complicated caste system, which we perhaps will not go into today, that is its own podcast, but it created this racial hierarchy, and then people use dress to transgress these prescribed social roles and these racial roles. It's super interesting. So your, your work speaks to it. I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about that Creole identity. I also find it fascinating that you talked about how dress became a central aspect of the feminine identity. So it's a strictly racialized society, but it's also a strictly gendered society.

[F]

Yes. So I've been thinking a lot about this, especially the gender identity side of it, because again, looking at portraits, where you see the most differences from European dress is in women portraits. But scholars have written about how many times women are the ones that continue carrying, quote, unquote, traditional dress in colonial situations, while men adopt the sort of transnational European styles. And that definitely creates some sort of gender differences between men and women. And so I wonder if the fact that we seem to see more differences in the dress of women in portraits than in the dress of men when we look at them in comparison to European portraits or European dress of the time, I wonder if there's something to say about that. But this is an idea that I am still navigating. And then when it comes to the Casta system, I think this is definitely an essential part of the Spanish Empire, I think, in general. And we spoke very briefly about the presence of the Moors in Spain, or how the Spanish called them the Moors in Spain. And then Spanish culture was founded on Catholicism. And so the presence of the Jews was also very, very uncomfortable for them. And so even before the Americas came to form part of the Spanish empire in Spain, they already had what they called the Spanish culture, which actually encompasses four different reigns, but I'm not gonna go into that right now. And then you also had the Moors and the Jews. And so Castas were founded on this difference and on the need to prove who was truly Spanish. And then when they moved to the Americas, they had two added components, which were the American natives and Africans. And of course, all of the intermixing that turned from there, that, as you mentioned, got really, really complicated, that they have all of these, I think, funny names for all of the different combinations. But in truth, I do have trouble thinking that human intermixing is just pure math. You know, I'm 30% Spanish and 25% indigenous. That's very, very, very difficult to count, basically. And so I think we see that happening in the Spanish Empire. And so they are trying to separate all of these groups. And dress, of course, is a very important part of that separation. But it's very difficult to, because, among other things, you can also pass as something that you are not. And so Anne Twynham actually has written about it briefly on her book Public Private Secrets, which is about people who were pursuing legal cases to request that they be identified as pure blooded Spaniards, even though sometimes they actually had African mothers, for example. And so dress was a very important part in these cases. So people were saying, for example, or they were actually calling people to testify that they had Spanish manners, that they dressed like the Spaniards to show how Spanish they were. And so here we see that biology doesn't necessarily coincide with the legal document or with the social and cultural attitudes. And this is also very interesting because at the beginning of the colonial period, people or American natives were forbid to wear Spanish dress, and so they had to wear their separate dress. But then in the 1780s, especially in the Viceroyalty of New Granada and Peru, there were a lot of indigenous uprisings. And so the Spaniards got scared and they prohibited them from wearing indigenous dress. They now wanted them to dress as Spaniards because they thought that dress could have them get together and rebel against the Spanish ground. So it also gets very, very complicated,

[E]

super complicated history. Like I said, the caste system and dress is its own podcast. It's super fascinating. Like you just attested to, race is basically this kind of fluid, socially fluid identity that you could really traverse by your comportment, by your status in society, by the very clothing that you wore. So it's a fascinating history. And we're going to talk more about Spanish American identity and dress after a brief sponsor break.

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[E]

Welcome back. So Laura, you write that Spanish American dressed Creole identity, Creole being this idea that Spaniards quote unquote full blood Spaniards born in the Spanish American colonies. So this Creole identity was a negotiation of French and uniquely Spanish American American fashion. Can you tell us about some of the regionally specific types of garments that contributed to what you refer to as this uniquely Spanish American self fashioning?

[F]

So I mentioned the use of accessories as in the watch example that I gave before and I think that's an important part. But more recently I've been interested in specific garments that seem to have been worn in the Americas. And uniquely some of these garments are not necessarily unique to the Americas, but how people wore them was. So one of them, for example is the faldeggin, which is a sort of a shaped calf length skirt that was possibly pleated that people wore in the or around the Audiencia de Quito, maybe also in Peru. And this fardagin is very very interesting. Well, first of all because it's calf length, which for the 18th century was just scandalous, and also because women in Spain seem to have wore a version of this valdegine as an undergarment. One of these garments is the valdegine which was a shaped and calf length skirt. It seems to have been pleated at some times and it was worn by women in the Audiencia de Quito, which was part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada and maybe in Peru. And this was a very very interesting garment because it seems to have developed from sort of the conjunction of indigenous and Spanish dress. And actually James Middleton has written about it, about how the Valdegine developed from the Spanish at home dress of women and the Inca anacu, a sort of like wrapped skirt that women wore in. Well, it became a skirt during the colonial period. And this is very interesting, especially the mixing of cult. Although here I must say that it's very, very difficult to understand this sort of hybridity in garments, because first of all, that shouldn't be the goal because of course things are going to be hybrid in a colonial setting. And then second of all, we should be more interested in understanding exactly the factors that brought about these hybrid products and the violence, of course. And if anyone's interested in this whole philosophical debate about hybridity, Caroline Dean and Dana Liveson actually wrote a fantastic article about it that I sincerely recommend. But going back to the faltagine, because it was ankle length or calf length, it was basically scandalous for European men at the time. And so you see comments about women wearing this dress and how weird it was, and they all describe it and mention it. But then you also see commentaries of indigenous men writing about the faldegine as this proof of how women were basically selling themselves to Spanish men and this being indigenous women. And so if it was criticized by everyone, by all of the men in this society, by both indigenous and European men, then why were women wearing it? And it wasn't just mixed race women or indigenous women, wealthy upper class white women were also wearing this garment. And this departs completely from the Spanish fashions of the time, or even the French fashions of the time. Again, because it's an a shaped skirt that is cuff length. I have not seen that in the fashion of the second half of the 18th century on the other side of the Atlantic. But I don't know if anyone else has.

[E]

No, it's super interesting and it sounds like it's unique to this period and place and intersection of cultures, like you mentioned.

[F]

Yes. And then the other one that I was thinking about, and this is one of the examples of the garments that were used in Europe but were used differently in Europe is the pollera, which seems to have been worn in Spain first as a cage, as a sort of farthingale, and then it came to mean underskirt. But again, when you look at travelers accounts in the Americas, they mention the pollera as an outer skirt that women wear on the streets and to parties and things like that. And so it could be just a difference in Terminology. But I don't think that the word choice is coincidental, especially when you see European men writing about this garment with the same name that they use in Spain, stain. So I wonder again if there's something to say about this garment specifically and like fashion in the Americas and maybe even conceptions about the body and what is considered to be virtuous or not, if there are maybe any gender implications in that. And I think I know I have many more questions than answers for this garment, but that's definitely something that I've been thinking about recently.

[E]

Well, it's interesting too, especially when you talk about gendered identity and women self fashioning. So were they making a statement by wearing that was probably a lot more comfortable than these like street sweeping garments? And it's interesting to note too that in Spanish colonial society, women had more rights than a lot of other European women. They could own property, for instance. And so it does make sense perhaps that they did have a little bit more autonomy over their own body and what they put on it. So I look forward to following your research as you learn more about this topic. So as you have attested to, portraiture served a very specific purpose of asserting the sitter's wealth, status and identity. However, as you also talked about, these are paintings, there's a definite question as to authenticity. You can obviously paint whatever you want, for instance, I know one of the questions you ask in your research is, quote, are the Spanish American portraits mainly a sort of montage of sources founded by artists and prints that came from Europe, or did people really own such lavish dresses, jewelry and decorations? So to answer this question, you had to take a multi methodological approach. You have to move beyond paintings to really study them in conversation with written documents. So that includes correspondence, wills, dowries, and of course, extant garments and textiles. I would love if you could share with us both what types of garments you've actually found that exist from this period in the archives and also the people that you met in the archives, because I know you have a couple individuals that kind of came out and spoke to you.

[F]

Well, this is a huge question, and this is actually what made me want to pursue a PhD because I realized I had all of these questions and I was like, I won't be able to answer them by just looking at portraits for a year or by writing a paper. So this is Basically my entire PhD project in a nutshell. But so yes, I think as I mentioned before, we can't look at portraits and see them as evidence for fashion history. But at the same time they have information that should be complemented by other sources. And so by looking at portraits together with other things, we can start seeing what fashion actually looked like. And I mentioned some of the comments that I found in Travelers accounts. But then textiles and garments specifically are super, super important in all of this process. And unfortun for Latin America, we don't have a lot of extant garments. We do have a lot of ecclesiastical textiles, and we have a lot of textile fragments, but we don't have very many full garments. There's one that I love, and that's my probably favorite garment of them all, is a waistcoat at the Colonial Museum in Bogota that I believe was woven in golden thread. I'm not entirely sure. The museum just says that it's metallic thread. We don't know which metal, but just because of the color. I think it might be golden thread, but it's of course, very rusty and it looks grayish right now. But I think if this waistcoat was actually made of gold, I just keep imagining how, you know, shiny it must have been at the time, and it has little brown and blue flowers embroidered throughout, and it must have been just fantastic. And then when you think about that waistcoat worn with breeches and with a cassock that were probably of some other color, and you see all of this shiny gold underneath, I just keep dreaming about seeing that. But of course I don't think I ever will. And then the other garment that I really like is also a male garment, which is funny because I focus more on female fashions. But then all of these garments are menswear, and there's probably also something to say about gender differences in gender ideas. And why do we keep the garments of possibly powerful men and not women? But anyway, the other garment that I really, really like is Jasok from the Museo de la Independencia, also in Bogota, that is almost in pristine condition. And I find that fascinating. It has typical 18th century brocaded fabric with floral motifs, which is amazing. And then there are some other garments here and there. Most of these garments are likely of European origin. Most of them were also likely made or belonged to Viceroy's or people in the government, and that's why we still have them. I hope that as I advance in my research, I get access to other textiles, maybe private collections. I don't think that I know a private collection of dresses in South America, but maybe someone has, I don't know, their great grandfather's coat or something. So hopefully I'll see that at some point. And then Archival documents are also really, really important. And as you mentioned, I have met some people in there. One of them is Dona Maria Victorina Losa, who is really interesting. She was a woman, she was married to a merchant, and she embroidered her own waistcoats and cassocks and she sold them through her husband, who would travel to the different port cities and like, ship her garments, which is really interesting. But lately I've been looking into this legal document related to the taxation of a set of goods imported from Castilla in Spain to Quito. And it's fantastic because it's like 50 folios filled with lists of goods. And you see the pasador here, or the person who's in charge of valuing the goods, commenting. And the reason why this became a legal document is because the person who was doing the import, the merchant, so to speak, was not happy with how much taxes they asked him to pay. And so he requested for someone else to look at these, these goods and recharge for the taxes. And so the pasador who was in charge of doing that, you find all of these fantastic comments about how the previous person had no clue of what they were doing. And so he writes things like, there are these textiles that the previous person said they were of the first quality, but they're actually not that good. And there are these socks that keep coming up over and over again in the different boxes, and they all have like, stripes. And so you can get a glimpse of what people were demanding at the time. There's also a lot of information about the actual kind of trading conditions. So some of the pieces are now useless because they were eaten by moths or because water got into the boxes and things like that. And those are real life issues. And I think not just of merchants, but of people when keeping their clothes in their homes. So I think that's. Yes, I've definitely been spending a lot of time looking into that document.

[E]

And something I find so fascinating about these inventories and wills, et cetera, where dress and clothing and textiles play such a central role, you realize how central they were to the everyday, Every people's everyday lives is this idea of the language of clothing or the language of dress. So men and women in the colonial empire and of course Europe, any across anywhere, really could read clothing. It was that important. So they knew the differences in textiles, they knew the differences in qualities, they knew what was fashionable and what was not. So it's really interesting to see that articulated across genders in the archives.

[C]

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[E]

something I wanted to mention too, that our listeners might have caught on, is that you were talking about religious articles of dress in the archive. So religious dress is steeped in tradition. What does it have to do with fashion? How are you using religious garments to to gain insight into into fashionable clothing? Because it really seems like the two are at odds with one another.

[B]

Yes.

[F]

I know this is random. It sounds very random.

[E]

I love it. It's a great methodology.

[F]

Yes, well. And in the Spanish world, at least, textiles were very, very important. In the Catholic Church, they were part of the Catholic rituals. They were used to adorn altars and interiors and the walls of the churches. And, of course, priests wore their very specific garments, and they were pretty luxurious. Well, I think they still are. And so fine textiles were very, very important in church settings. And there's a book that's fresh out of the press, written by Maya Stanfield, that's called Clothing the New World Church, if anyone wants to learn more about this. But when we talk specifically about fashion, there was this phenomenon that happened in the Spanish Empire and probably also in other Catholic societies, where people, for example, donated their most important textiles to their church at. As part of their sort of pious offerings. And again, you were talking about the value of textiles and how important they were in this society. And so precisely because they had such a high value, they were donated to the churches. And sometimes they were also donated. You find this in testaments. They donate certain things so that the church will say a mass after them every week or so. So sometimes they were used in payment for certain sort of, like, favors in return from the church. And then the other thing that's very, very important and also fascinating is that sculptures of saints and the Virgin Mary specifically were actually dressed. And they were dressed to show their sanctity, their superiority, you know, how elite they were. And this, of course, had to capitalize on the common understandings of what men being superior as communicated through dress in the Spanish societies and, of course, in the Spanish American colonial society. And so this is interesting because the sculptures were meant to be dressed in ways that were not contemporary, just precisely to show how separate they were from the people that were looking at them. But at the same time, they used the languages of dress that were common at the time. And again, people donated their garments, their jewels. You see sculptures of the Virgin with these amazing, for example, girandal earrings that women were wearing at the time, precisely because women donated their earrings to the Virgin as part of their devotion. And we see that with dresses again. And so that's how religious textiles and religious dress sort of enters this whole thing, because it can show us some ideas of what fashion we're wearing at the time. And at the same time, because they were really just textiles, they have been better kept than secular textiles. And so we do have access to some of them, and we don't really have as much access to the clothing that people were anymore.

[E]

Yeah, basically, you have to get creative about how you access this information. Super fascinating. I'm super excited to continue to follow your research. And I mean, your intervention in fashion studies is really clear. Your research is bringing groundbreaking insights and perspectives into really a largely understudied topic. And you're doing it in a way which I particularly love, that makes your research accessible to people, to the public at large. And you do this through your digital humanities project, which is Imperio de la Moda, or Empire of Fashion, as well as your Spanish language podcast, Culturas de Moro. Can you talk about how you are working to expand and decolonize the field both publicly and academically?

[F]

Of course. Well, first of all, thank you. Thank you for your words about my work. I must say that this is super recomforting and heartwarming because I sometimes feel like I'm just crazy trying to do all of this. And then, yes, the second and very, very important thing for me is to make my knowledge and my research findings more accessible to people. And actually for me, that it's accessible in both English and Spanish is also very, very important, because one of the largest obstacles that I found is that there's not a lot of information that's easily accessible in Spanish. And then the other thing is that there's a lot of great work being done by scholars in Latin America and also great work being done by scholars outside of Latin America about Latin America. And they don't seem to be speaking a lot with each other. And there might be a language barrier there, which I understand, but. So I'm trying to position myself as a sort of mediator between the two.

[E]

Yeah, I was going to say bridging that gap.

[F]

And again, just sharing. I think people are very interested in Latin American history in general, and English increasingly in the history of the arts and fashion of Latin America. I see it as a responsibility, actually, to just share as much as I can. And so that's how Imperio de la Moda, my DH project, came about. And it was actually a product of one of the classes that I took at the beginning of my PhD on digital humanities. So that's basically a digital companion to my dissertation. It's coming about very, very slowly. What I am trying to do is to write short sort of essays or like, interpretations of dress and images and portraits. I would like to include some audiovisual materials to make it even more accessible for some people and Maybe even like 3D recreations of garments. Although this is a big dream that I am not sure if it will ever materialize. And at the first stages, I'm focusing on the Neo Granada because again, that's what my dissertation is about. But in the future I would love to include Spanish America as a whole and maybe even Brazil as well. But I also realized that this is a very ambitious project. Again, it's coming about very, very slowly. And then also I probably need many more resources than what I have, because right now, and this is one of the reasons why it's so slow, I just do it in my free time with the resources that I have. And for example, I don't think I have the skills to build 3D models just yet. So that's. I don't know if it'll ever happen. And so because I recognize that accessibility doesn't just mean putting things up online, that's why I've been trying to explore other ways of sharing this knowledge. And that's how Culturas de Mola came about and the podcast came about. And that's actually group work with three amazing friends and colleagues. Colleagues Sandra Mate Garcia Rada, Jennifer Barela Rodriguez, Melissa Suletta Bandera and Camila Villisambra were all Latinas. We all got our master's in Fashion studies at Parsons, though at different times. And basically what we're trying to do is to bring fashion studies to Spanish speakers around the globe. We have the podcast, we have a website that's publishing reviews and short essays. We're trying to expand the project to include a sort of archive of theses that have been written about Latin American fashion with. We joined forces with Draw Latin Fashion and Museo de Mola, which are two huge Instagram platforms for that purpose. And so just to bring all of these knowledge to Spanish speakers again, because I think fashion studies is already accepted in many ways in the English speaking world. And there are a lot of fantastic initiatives including this podcast, but we don't have as much in Spanish and not everyone is in as comfortable in English as for example, I am. So we're trying to again, bridge that gap. And then the one last thing also related to digital humanities is my work for the Fashion and Race database. I think through selections from the library, which are basically short reading lists, and through the Objects that Matter essays that I've been able to contribute there. I'm also trying to bring some of these knowledge now to the English speaking audience and again, moving beyond the more sort of pure academic setting and in ways that are short and easy or easier, friendlier than traditional academia and well, that wasn't actually the last thing. The last thing is social media. I'm very active, especially on Instagram, again, trying to share more. I'm still trying to figure out how my bilingual being figures there because I have a lot of Spanish speaking followers, so I do share a lot in Spanish, but I sometimes feel that I'm sort of rejecting the English speakers that are interested there. So that's. I'm still trying to figure out. But. But I think social media is also a very, very powerful tool and space to share all of this knowledge and I'm really all about sharing that.

[E]

Absolutely. And we will of course, dress listeners, provide links to all of your different projects. We're obviously huge fans of Fashion Race Database on this podcast and now we're huge fans of your work and we look forward to following it well into the future. I'm super excited about all the research you're doing and I can't wait to hear and learn more. Thank you so much for being here with us today.

[F]

Thank you. Thank you so, so, so much. This was fantastic.

[B]

Thank you Laura, for being so incredibly generous with your time and for sharing all of these incredible facets of your work. Dress listeners, please be sure and head to our show Notes for links to all of Laura's projects. It might go without saying that Cass and I are clearly huge fans of her work, especially her efforts to bridge the gap between English and Spanish written works published in the field of fashion studies. And we will definitely be following Laura's research well into the future. And so should you.

[E]

Yeah, and I mean, work like Laura's is so incredibly important in expanding the narratives of fashion history. Fashion history is so often centered around the legacy of French and British sartorial traditions, but Spain's influence rivaled, if not overshadowed, that of its European counter counterparts during the 16th, 17th and 18th century when the empire was at its greatest heights. Well, that does it for us today. Dressed listeners, may you consider Spain's empire of fashion. Next time you get dressed,

[A]

Please head to DressedPodcast on Instagram or Rest podcast without the underscore on Facebook to check out the video visual content associated with each week's episodes.

[C]

And remember, we always love hearing from you, so if you'd like to write to us, you can do so at. Hello DressedHistory.com DressedHistory.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 sleeves.

[A]

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 bookshop.org shop dressed and there you can find over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles and

[C]

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[C]

Thank you as always for tuning in and more dressed coming your way way very soon. The history of Fashion is a production of Dressed Media

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