Fashion and Image as Anthropographic Elements in Nineteenth-century Colombia

Abstract This article is the product of a research project about the role of image in the creation of the Colombian nation during the nineteenth century. Part of that image depended on the individuals it identified, their social status, their lifestyle, and their occupation. The image of fashion as a characteristic social identifier, as an icon, was a bearer of anthropographic symbols. In nineteenth-century Colombia, those symbols were connected to a republican identity characterized by its colonial heritage, determined by race, and by garments distinctive of specific social classes: formerly subjects and, later, citizens. Thus, the image that fashion conveyed as the “skin of the skin” of the republican ancestors, the elite, and the people constitutes a legacy that encompasses everything, from the manufacture of textiles and the indigenous ruana, to a kind of textile mestizaje with aspects of European provenance. Items from collections in museums, libraries, and archives, were compared to texts composed by travelers and illustrators, in order to unveil elements of national identity in what emerges as the landscape of fashion in Colombia during the nineteenth century.