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.

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).

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)

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

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.

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.