Fashion is an essential aspect of everyday life. This aspect, perhaps, has lead us to understand fashion as vain, superficial, unimportant. But fashion is at the center of multiple historical …
Read more “Redressing Fashion With Politics: A Historical Overview”
Isabella Rosner interviewed me for her podcast, Sew What? We talked about my research on the consumption, dissemination, and representation of dress and practices of self-fashioning in 18th-century colonial Spanish …
Read more “Fashion in 18th-Century Colonial Spanish America: An Interview in Sew What?”
I was interviewed by AFP Colombia about the crakows —or poulaines—, an elongated type of shoe that was worn in the Middle Ages. With the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic, …
Read more “Poulaines or Crakows Were Worn in the Middle Ages, but Not to Enforce Social Distancing”
In recent years, Colombia has experienced a renewed interest in social, political, and humanitarian issues, within a stormy political climate marked by the signing of a peace agreement in 2016 …
Read more “Design for Dissent: Political Participation and Social Activism in the Colombian Fashion Industry”
Luz Lancheros interviewed me about Kim Kardashian’s brand Kimono as a case of cultural appropriation. We talked about the problems that arise from taking inspiration from other cultures without recognizing …
Read more “#KIMOHNO: Denying Culture to Create Fashion”
Joy Davis interviewed me at the Costume Society of America’s Annual Symposium in Seattle for the third episode of the Unravel 2019 Costume Society of America Series. We talked about …
Read more “Unravel CSA Series: What’s the Deal with Spanish Colonial Dress? with Laura Beltran-Rubio”
During the eighteenth century, there was an increased interest in the Spanish World for French fashions and imported luxury goods, sparked by both the establishment of the Bourbon dynasty in …
Read more “Portraits and Performance: Dress and the Culture of Appearances in the Eighteenth-Century Viceroyalty of New Granada”
The mantón de Manila (Manila shawl) is one of the most symbolic elements of hispanic dress that, in recent history, has become an almost essential garment in museum collections of …
Read more “‘M’ is for mantón de manila”