The Spanish cut: tailoring men’s fashion and national identity in nineteenth-century Spain

ABSTRACT

This essay shows that middle-class men engaged with fashion often and openly in nineteenth-century Spain. Through a survey of previously unstudied archival materials, it also recasts Spanish men’s fashion as part of a larger, interconnected system of producers, distributors and consumers. By historicizing textual and visual evidence (e.g., paper garment patterns, fashion plates) printed in professional tailoring journals, the following study challenges the notion that fashion was an exclusively feminine and feminizing pursuit during the second half of the nineteenth century. Apprentices, journeymen, master cutters and their professional journals, such as El Arte Español (1871–1878), El Genio y el Arte (1881–1888) and La Moda de Madrid (1884–1887), identified fashionable ecosystems as fertile ground for the flourishing of an aspirational national image that cohered around sartorial craftsmanship and intellectual capital, pride in Spanish métiers and the cultivation of male homosocial bonds of confidence and trust.

KEYWORDS:

• Men’s fashion
• tailoring
• masculinity
• national identity
• nineteenth-century Spain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Nicholas Wolters is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish & Italian at Wake Forest University. His teaching and research interests include modern Spanish and Catalan literature and visual cultures (eighteenth to twenty-first centuries), masculinities studies, fashion and costume history, and film and television studies. His work on these and related topics has appeared in peer-reviewed edited volumes and journals including Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Anales Galdosianos and Romance Notes. His current book project, Masculine Figures: Fashioning Men and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spain, studies depictions of middle-class men – students, priests, businessmen and heirs – and the masculine norms they embody and resist in visual culture and realist novels of fin-de-siècle Spain. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 In an explanatory note, the editor outlines the story’s raison d’être:

Un amigo nuestro, víctima de los muchos petardistas que acosan a los sastres, tiene escritas unas cuantas cuartillas, haciendo la historia de algunos petardos sufridos; y como tiene algún interés para los sastres, puesto que solo de ellos trata, publicamos en esta sección dicha historieta, que debe tenerse muy presente, no tanto por su mérito literario, que no tiene pretensiones de ellos, sino por la verdad que encierra. (“El sastre” 1871, 8)

2 This essay focuses on El Arte Español and La Moda de Madrid. Of those journals cataloged by the Biblioteca Nacional de España, only one (El Genio y el Arte) has been partly digitized in its online database. This digital lacuna provides at least a partial explanation for the lack of primary evidence in critical surveys of men’s fashion in nineteenth-century Spanish contexts to date. McKinney, for example, cites the nonexistence of fashion magazines marketed to men in nineteenth-century Spain as a possible reason for the absence of Spanish source material in Pena González’s often-cited overview of men’s fashion during the Romantic period (McKinney 2012, 90n5). It is true that the type of fashion magazines marketed directly to female consumers, such as El Correo de la Moda, did not exist for men. However, the abundance of journals used by tailors, hatters and shoemakers suggests that male shoppers deferred to the expertise of the professional and the craftsman to negotiate a fashionable look. While Heneghan recognizes “the importance of a tailor in the men’s world in the early decades of the nineteenth century in Spain”, she directs readers to an 1835 satirical sketch (“Los sastres”) by Manuel Bretón de los Herreros (2015, 123n7, 124n13).

3 By the end of the nineteenth century, fashion was an international affair. However, certain traditional garments like the cape continued to be a staple of menswear in Spain, especially in the provinces (Sousa Congosto 2007, 271–272).

4 There is no doubt that cartoonists regularly poked fun at narcissistic male shoppers who obsessed over their appearance. Excessive attention to clothing and fashion among men was often viewed negatively due to the potential for such interests to either distract from more serious matters or undermine virtues of moderation and self-discipline inflecting acceptable patterns of masculinity enshrined in prescriptive conduct literature (Labanyi 2000, 216; McKinney 2014, 102). For some men and women, conspicuous, masculine interest in la moda threatened to blur gender categories that were increasingly policed by criminologists, hygienists, cultural commentators and priests. Critiques of fashionable men accrued validity for those who saw “natural” affinities weaving through fashion, foreign (i.e., French) cultural influence and the feminine.

5 Furthermore, the existence of a robust professional literature for tailors – which also had implications for the formation of middle-class cultures of consumption – supports Cruz’s and Valis’s assertions that nineteenth-century Spain belongs in the historicization of European paradigms of bourgeois modernization (Cruz 2011, 50; Valis 2002, 11).

6 Starting around the 1880s, department stores and bazaars like Barcelona’s El Siglo began to publish their own catalogs and almanaques advertising novelties in menswear and accessories that would appeal to men, women and children alike. These, too, require more critical attention, as they challenge the notion that men were absent from fashion’s visual cultural record at the end of the nineteenth century. For an initial overview, see Pasalodos Salgado’s (2012) exploration of such texts cataloged by the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

7 Advertising cards – distributed at the point of sale or mailed to the homes of regular shoppers – were yet another popular way for both tailors and department stores to advertise to men. The Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona owns an impressive collection of these materials produced and distributed between 1850 and the first quarter of the twentieth century. For this article, I examined copies of Figure 6 in the Biblioteca Nacional de España and the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.

Additional information

Funding

Research related to this project was made possible by generous support from The Archie Fund (2017, 2018, 2019) at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (USA).