A recurring theme when romantic novels of the 19th century were made into films Colombia was the confrontation between the idea of the modern body and conceptions of beauty, wardrobe and love from the romanticism of the previous century. Novels such as Aura o las Violetas, by Jose Maria Vargas Vila or El amor, el Deber y el Crimen made into a film by Pedro Moreno Garzon in 1924, as well as the version of Jorge Isaacs’ Maria shot by Maximo Calvo-Olmedo in 1922 recount a feminine ideal of a young girl that still gravitated in the minds of the people of Bogota in the twenties, despite the masculinization of women and the simplification of the wardrobe proposed at the beginning of the century by Coco Chanel. Guided by traditional representations that were mixed with consumption habits from abroad, the art direction of these films did not escape from the superposition of fashion as a sign of modernity; but at the same time the loose hair and white lace formed the idea of the purity of the young women who languish for love. Thus, through the development of a methodology from social semiotics, a group of scenes are analyzed in which the wardrobe and the body of the protagonists denote the nuances of a coexistence between the modern and the traditional