Dr Laura Beltran-Rubio

Dr Laura Beltrán-Rubio is a researcher, curator, and educator, specializing in the history of art and fashion in the early modern Spanish World. She is a doctoral candidate at the College of William and Mary and received her MA in Fashion Studies from Parsons School of Design. Her research explores the construction and performance of identities through artistic expression, with a broad interest in global Indigenous fashion and textiles. More specifically, her work analyzes the importance of Indigenous ways of knowing in the development of fashion and textile arts in the Americas from the early colonial period to the present-day, while uncovering the endurance of colonialist dynamics in contemporary fashion.

Laura is Lecturer in Design Cultures at De Montfort University. She completed her PhD at The College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, VA) and an MA in Fashion Studies at Parsons School of Design (New York). She has previously taught at Parsons, William & Mary, and Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). She writes for The Fashion and Race Database and hosts the podcast Redressing Fashion. As a public-facing scholar, Laura’s mission is to expand the narratives of fashion to create more diverse, equitable, and socially just societies.

• Indigenous Heritage in Latin American Fashion
• ‘Covered in much fine lace’: Dress in the Viceroyalty of New Granada.
• Cuerpos, moda y género en el Virreinato de la Nueva Granada. Un estudio a partir de la pollera y el faldellín (Bodies, Fashion, and Gender in the Viceroyalty of New Granada: The Pollera and the Faldellín)

Art and design history and theory, Global Indigenous textile arts, Practice-based and experimental research, Decoloniality, Digital Humanities/Digital Art History

Fashion History, Textile History, Material Culture, Decoloniality

• PhD American Studies, William & Mary (Williamsburg, VA, USA)
• MA Fashion Studies, Parsons School of Design (New York, NY, USA)
• BA Economics, Universidad de los Andes (Bogota DC, Colombia)

Design Cultures

2024

• “Diversifying the Tailoring Trade in the Colonial Andes.” Paper given at the Material Culture in the Early Modern World workshop at the University of Cambridge, 30 January 2024.

2023

• “Más allá de lo tropical. Hacia la diversificación de la identidad latina en la moda” (Beyond Tropicalism: Diversifying Latin American Identities in Fashion). Invited talk given at Semana Latinoamericana de Diseño Sostenible (Latin American Sustainable Design Week), Las Flores, Argentina, 15–16 November 2023.
• “Tailoring the Market for Fashion in Seventeenth-Century New Kingdom of Granada.” Conference paper given at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference (San Juan, Puerto Rico), 9–11 March 2023.

2022

• “The Artifice of Fashion: Creating and Performing Identities through Clothing in the Colonial Spanish Americas.” Invited talk given at the closing roundtable of The Fabric of the Spanish Americas: A Symposium, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, 20 October 2022.
• “Identity and Fashion in Latin America,” invited conversation with Hanayrá Negreiros. ¡Moda Hoy! Latin American and Latinx Fashion: Symposium at The Museum at FIT, New York, 7 October 2022.
• “Fashioning the Spanish Empire: Dress, Portraiture, and the 18th-Century Culture of Appearances.” Invited talk given at The Spanish South: The New Orleans Antiques Forum 2022, 4–7 August 2022.
• “La moda y el cuerpo en el Virreinato de la Nueva Granada. Un análisis del faldellín.” Moda latinoamericana: una mirada interseccional (Latin American Fashion: An Intersectional Approach). Invited talk given at a panel series organized by Red Iberoamericana de Historiadoras, streamed on YouTube, 23 February 2022.

I support creative brands in their research, storytelling, and archiving practices, supporting them to achieve more ethical, diverse, and equitable practices in the fashion and design industries. Previous engagements have included historical research for the development of collection concepts and storytelling, auditing communications to avoid cultural appropriation and misrepresentation, and facilitating collaborations with Indigenous designers from Latin America.
Currently available.

0000-0002-3749-2606