The Spanish cut: tailoring men’s fashion and national identity in nineteenth-century Spain
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; masculinity; national identity; nineteenth-century Spain; tailoring
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: Department of Spanish & Italian, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA
Publication date: 02 July 2020
- Editorial Board
- Information for Authors
- Subscribe to this Title
- Ingenta Connect is not responsible for the content or availability of external websites
- Access Key
- Free content
- Partial Free content
- New content
- Open access content
- Partial Open access content
- Subscribed content
- Partial Subscribed content
- Free trial content