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Dressed: The History of Fashion
Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez with Amanda Wunder, Part I (Dressed Classic)
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This episode is brought to you by NBA on Prime. This Tuesday at 8:30 Eastern it's the Emirates NBA Cup Championship Game on Prime. This year's quest for the cup has been building to this the championship game live from Las Vegas. Not a Prime member. Sign up for a 30 day free trial to get started today. The Emirates NBA Cup Championship Game this Tuesday at 8:30 Eastern only on Prime. Restrictions apply. See Amazon.com amazonprime for details.
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Even at the last minute. Phew.
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Find a Marshall's near you.
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A
Please enjoy one of our favorite episodes from the Dressed archive of over 500 plus shows. The history of Fashion is a production of dressed media. With over 8 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common. Every day we all get dressed.
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Welcome to Dressed the History of Fashion, a podcast where we explore the who, what, when of why we wear. We are fashion historians and your hosts.
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A
April Callahan and I'm Cassidy Zachary, dress listeners. Like so many episodes of Dressed, this one today has been years in the making. I actually first invited today's guest who is the historian Dr. Amanda Wonder. I invited her on the show, I think three or four years ago and I had emailed her after I read this fantastic article she wrote about women's fashion and politics in 17th century Spain. And she wrote me back and she said, yes, I would love to come on the show, but can we wait until my book comes out that I am working on, to which I of course gave an enthusiastic yes. Fast forward to the day and here we are. I cannot be more thrilled to have her join us to discuss her incredibly fascinating and intensely researched book, Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velasquez, a tailor at the court of Philip iv.
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In addition to being the first archival study of dress at the court of the Spanish monarch Philip iv, the book centers around the life and the work of royal court tailor Matteo Aguado, whose name and significant contributions Amanda brings to light for the very first time, and that none of us have likely heard his name is remarkable when you consider the fact that Mateo was a tailor to not one but two queens of Spain for 42 years. So he was a royal tailor from 1630 to 1672, but despite not knowing his name, you are all likely familiar with his work. His striking dress designs for the queens and their children fare prominently in the famous portraits of his contemporary, the renowned Spanish queen, court painter Diego Velasquez.
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Arguably, Mateo was an equally if not more important figure than Velazquez in that he played an incredibly significant role in defining not just the public Personas of the women and children of the Spanish royal court, but their day to day lives as well. And yet only one of these men, so between Diego and Mateo is remembered and celebrated today. But that is all about to change the because with her book, Amanda seeks to, quote, put the tailor back in the picture. And she really does this incredible job of restoring Mateo to his rightful place as one of the great image makers and fashion designers in history.
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A brief introduction to Amanda before she joins us on the show. She specializes in the art and History of 17th century Spain, and her other published works include the book Baroque Sacred Art and A Century of Crisis. And she has also been a Fulbright scholar and formerly a fellow at the Met Metropolitan Museum of Art. And she's currently a professor of history and art history at the City University of New York. And now she is a Dressed guest. Amanda, welcome to the show.
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A
Amanda, welcome to Dressed. I am so excited to talk to you today.
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C
Thank you, Cassidy. It's great to meet you.
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A
So it's actually not every day on the podcast that we get to talk to a cultural historian of early modern Europe, much less someone who focuses on Spanish fashion history. Can you tell us just a little bit about your path to this subject matter?
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C
Sure. So my work in Spain dates back to my undergraduate years when I spent a year in Seville studying and became really fascinated with the place, the people, the culture, and went on to do a PhD in early modern Spanish history and wrote a dissertation on a very obscure academic topic that was very divorced from my sort of personal interests, which include a real passion for making clothes. And so it wasn't until after I'd finished my degree that I discovered material culture studies as this exciting new world and realized I could actually combine my personal interest in making clothes with my academic interests. And so this, this book about an early modern tailor was a book that actually drew on these two very different skill sets of, you know, including making bound buttonholes and reading 17th century Spanish paleography.
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A
I actually love that you came to this after you did your PhD. We love to ask people about their journey and their careers because everybody comes at it from Such different ways. And it is a journey, Right. It's a development, and it could take, you know, decades, sometimes your entire life to really find it. But that's actually really inspiring and ass. So I would love if we could start with just an introduction to the subject of your book, which is the royal Spanish tailor, Matteo Aguado. How did you first come to meet him in the archive? And what did you discover about him?
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C
So Matteo Aguado was the tailor to the queens of Spain for over 40 years, from 1630 until his death in 1672. And so he was the tailored precisely during the same time that Velazquez was at work at the Spanish court making his unforgettable court portraits. So Matteo Aguado is the guy who dressed all the women and girls that we're seeing in Velazquez's portraits, made those incredible dresses that we're looking at in the museums. My original intention was to work on a book much, much broader than the book I ended up writing, which was supposed to be a history of Spanish fashion from 1492 to 1700, really digging into the experiences and sort of daily lives of people with their clothes. But what I found was I was just really, really interested in the people who were making clothes and what they were making. And the records for that kind of search were at the Royal palace archive in the artisan accounts. And I was looking through the file of the tailor's accounts, and I just kept coming across this name, Matteo Aguado, on literally hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents. I have to say, it took me a really long time, several, quite a few years, before I realized, first of all, what a treasure trove this was, and second, that this was really the subject of the book that I was going to be writing.
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A
Yeah. And I just have to say, this book is phenomenal. What you have done with these kind of disparate pieces, or seemingly disparate pieces, perhaps, of archival information and documents and portraits and surviving textiles and putting them together to tell this incredibly rich story, not just of Spanish fashion, but one man and, of course, several other artisans that you feature in the book as well. But this sort of attention and documentation and detail related to one person in the 17th century, this is just not something that we often see from this period. So that must have been incredibly exciting once you started putting all those pieces together.
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C
Thanks. It really was. And, you know, what I really learned from this is that if you take the kind of attention to an artisan, in this case a tailor, that we typically pay only to people like the most famous painters, like Diego Velazquez, or to princes and kings and prime ministers, we can actually learn an incredible amount about their lives and piece together their entire family histories. And in this case, reconstruction completely lost garments and wardrobes based on these archival sources. So it was incredibly exciting. I became absolutely addicted to the archival work from the process of doing this book.
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A
And can you talk to us a little bit about the different types of source material you found and used to paint this rich and very textural world for us? Because not a lot of garments and textiles actually survive. So you really piece this together using a lot of different sources. And for as famous as Velazquez's depiction of dresses are, he's not exactly known for paying much attention to detail in the dresses. So how did you shape and bring this world to life?
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C
Right. Well, you know, Velazquez is incredibly frustrating when it comes to. If you're studying fashion history, he's really annoying. But when it comes to the sources for this book, so the main source is Matteo Aguado's account records. And so these are incredibly tedious lists and lists and lists of the garments that he made for the queens of Spain and for the other people that he dressed at the Spanish court. And so at first glance, they really don't seem to say very much. It says, you know, a doublet, a skirt, an overgown of black damask, and another one of brown velvet, and on and on and on. But when you start actually reading through the lines. And what I did was I just. I transcribed these documents first of all. I started transcribing them just so I could understand them, because the vocabulary was so obscure, I couldn't understand them at all. And so I started transcribing them just as a way of trying to understand what they were saying. And then what I ended up doing was just transcribing them all into spreadsheets, which were then searchable, and I could organize them and sort them. And so what these tell us then is not only what the garments are that he made, but sort of in between the lines, you find details about his daily life. That he stayed up all night making this one for this holiday, or that the Queen sent something back because she didn't like it, and she wanted him to replace 30 dozen buttons by the next morning. And so, you know, gradually, over time, working with these documents really intensively, I started to get this much broader sense, not just of the specifics of what he was making, but what his life was like working for the Queen. So that's the main source. But then, in addition to that, we have what was incredibly lucky here was this. A lot of personal documents related to Matteo Aguado. And this is incredibly lucky that the palace archive has personnel files on artisans. And a lot of them will just have like a page, one or two pages of documents. And the archive for Matteo Aguado has a few dozen, and that's a lot for this time period. And these really told the story of his ups and downs at the court in the course of his employment, like the time that he was briefly fired for disobeying his superior. And so you get these incredibly rich details and a little better sense of his personality from those documents. But I was really lucky that someone else had published a reference to his inventory in the notarial archive in Madrid, which is infamous for being impossible to find anything because everything is organized by the name of the notary, not by the names of the people. Oh, no searching for. And so that was an incredible find. And so I had this over 100 page document describing his post mortem inventory, so describing absolutely everything that the tailor had owned. And from that we could reconstruct his house and his family life. And so putting together a much bigger picture of his life, both personal and professional, than I ever would have expected would be possible.
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A
Yeah, and I love that you write about how you used his own words to write a working terminology to describe the dress elements that are featured in the book. I mean, dress listeners, I just have to say, if you're going to buy one fashion history book this year, this is it. Because this is just an incredible, incredible book in so many ways, especially because of the rich archival source. You have the portraits, of course, but then you have things like iron rods for shaping roughs, elements of that material culture that went into the construction of these royal images, including extant textiles and garments. And those documents that you were talking to. The fact that the Royal palace had records about their artisans really just talks about something we're going to talk more in detail about today, which is the central role that these artisans played in constructing the image of these royals, the. That they recognize as being incredibly important and significant. You had the royal tailor, but also royal embroideries. I mean, there's entire teams that we're going to talk about today. And I'm just so excited to do that with you today. So before we dive into Matteo's specific world at the Spanish court, I would love if you could just first set the scene with a bit of context. Can you tell us about the blossoming garment and fashion industries of 17th century Madrid, which is the home of the Spanish court, and what role the tailor in general played there, not just at the royal court, but within the society at large.
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C
Absolutely. So Matteo Iguodo moves to Madrid in the early 1600s, which was an incredibly dynamic moment in fashion history. The court was based in Madrid, but then had been temporarily relocated and returns to Madrid in 1606. And so after this moment, Madrid grows exponentially in population, where the. Basically where the court is, is where everyone wants to be. And so not only do you have a sudden demand to dress the royal family, but also all the aristocrats who come to be their courtiers, all of their servants who need livery. You have, in addition to that, the actors and actresses who are performing in the public theaters, you have the priests who are saying mass in all of the churches in Madrid, and just so many people needing clothes. And so you have this incredible influx of artisans who come to Madrid to dress the court. And this includes not just tailors, but of course, everyone involved in the garment manufacturing trade, including the needle makers. Right. You have so many different people who are going to be participating in this, and these people need clothes too. So there's just this incredible demand for clothing, both new and used, in Britain in the early 1600s. And it's all concentrated in what I like to think of as Madrid's garment district at the time, which is the central part of the city, located right between the palace and the Plaza Mayor. And you can, through the documents, just get this incredibly vivid picture of this bustling part of town where you have fashion everywhere in the streets, you've got young boys walking around crying out to sell used shoes that have been refurbished. You've got the garments hanging in storefront on the street, in front of the shops where they're being sold. Fashion is absolutely everywhere. And the role that the tailor play in this is obviously a really important one. Really interestingly, there is a big shift in Madrid because of this huge demand for fashion. And much to my surprise, I found we have the rise of a ready to wear market in Madrid in the early 1600s, which of course, is something we don't think of as really happening until the 19th century. But you go into a store in Madrid in 1615 and buy a premade dresser suit in size, small or large. So there's a lot of change going on in Madrid. Right. Isn't that surprising?
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A
That is surprising.
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C
There's so much change going on in the tailoring profession and there's so much demand for clothing that this has a really big impact on the profession at large. And so what we see from that is an increase in inequality within the profession and the. The situation where we've got a few really, really well off tailors at the very tip top of the hierarchy. And then the vast majority of tailors are working under them with, for very minimal wages and with absolutely no autonomy over their work. And at the very, very top of the profession, you have the tailor to the Queen who is by far the best remunerated and the most. Has the most creative job of all the tailors in Madrid.
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A
And possibly the most stressful as we will talk about.
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C
Exactly.
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A
I really enjoyed this chapter in your book, which is one of the first, if not the first, where you really talk about the tailoring profession and how it had a bad rep. Can you talk a little bit about that? There's this quote you say, what came first, the tailor are the lie. So they really had not a fabulous reputation. And they were amending that around this time through various actions.
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Right. That was a quote from Francisco de Cavedo, who's one of the great satirists from the Spanish court who had a lot of negative things to say about Taylor's. And this, I think is really interesting because we don't think of Taylor's as being controversial figures, but certainly in the literature of the time, the dishonest Taylor is such a trope. And you find this for a couple of reasons. One, because tailors were working with incredibly expensive materials. And while I mentioned this ready to wear market, the much more typical and common thing was that you did have your clothes made to order by a tailor. And so if you commissioned the tailor to make you a garment, you would be responsible for buying the fabric and the trimmings that would go on it. And you'd have to rely on the tailor to tell you how much fabric you needed. Now, fabric is really, really expensive and it's worth so much more than the tailor's labor. And so you had to be able to trust the tailor to know he's not going to be telling you that you need more fabric than the garment actually requires and then stealing a remnant for his own use. So that's one of the sources of the trope of the dishonest tailor. Also, tailors, of course, had really intimate access to their clients, including female clients. And so this made people pretty nervous. And there's lots of stories in literature and poetry of jealous men who are doing everything they can to avoid their. Their love interests. Coming close to a tailor.
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A
And were there. I mean, we. I know about this more in France, but was there. Was it a gendered profession? Obviously, tailoring was. But were women allowed to make women's dresses or was it just exclusively men?
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Oh, great question. So this was something that was really interesting, I found, is that of course, for the most part, this is a male profession. It is a profess, it's organized by a guild, and the vast majority of tailors are men. But there's this amazing source, which is a list of members of all the guilds of Madrid. And if you comb through it, it tells you the names of the professionals and where they lived and how much they donated to the king for a particular donation. And in the lists of the tailors, there are a few names of women, which was really interesting. Typically, a woman is going to come into the profession as the wife of a deceased tailor. She might inherit his position. And so you do have some women working as tailors who've inherited the post from a husband. But that's only the people who. We see their names listed in the records. There's countless people who will never know about. I think women and children were really heavily involved in the tailoring profession. Matteo Aguado's wife had two wives, for instance. The first one only lived for about nine months, and the second one he was married to for over 40 years. And I am absolutely convinced that she played a pivotal role in his workshop. There's no doubt that she was engaged in that, but of course, there's not a scrap of paper to testify to that. So women's labor is definitely in there, but mostly not recorded. Unless these are widows who've inherited their husband's posts.
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A
Yeah, and don't worry, dress listeners, there are a few women makers I think we'll talk about more in detail in the relationship to maybe undergarments coming up in a bit. But before we move on from this, something I also found really fascinating was that fees were set by law, so you couldn't just charge a client whatever you wanted. So I guess that speaks to the dishonest Taylor as well, that your fees were set. You spoke about how labor was really inexpensive, but materials were super expensive. That's where really a lot of the cost is coming from. And then there's also this apprentice system, which I thought was just fascinating, which you alluded to when you talked about the hierarchy. But they had to take tests. There was a really rigid infrastructure that you had to go through to even be called a tailor. And then you Kind of would sit in this limbo position as a journeyman, and maybe you rose through the ranks and maybe you didn't. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
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C
Absolutely. So this, as you said, the guild profession was heavily regulated. There was this apprenticeship system. And this wasn't, of course, just for tailors. This is for all the artisanal professions. And so at the very bottom, you have the apprentice who starts as a young teen, and there's a number of quite a few surviving apprentice contracts, so we can see what their work situation was. And basically, they would work for a master tailor, and for most of the days of the year, with holidays off, and they would have to work from sunup to sundown in the service of the master tailor. And then in return for that, they would get living accommodations, you know, enough suit of clothes, food. They were supposed to be taken care of when they got sick, unless they had a venereal disease, in which case they were on their own, and the apprenticeship would last. It's interesting. It's all through your adolescence. So you imagine that adolescent boys were largely engaged in this training period. And then once you move on from becoming an apprentice, you move into what you put really well was this limbo of the journeyman tailor. And the journeyman tailor would not be able to work independently. There were really strict rules saying it was only a master tailor, which is the one who had passed the skilled examination, was able to cut out fabric. And that was really the definition of the tailor as one who cuts clothes, not sews. Sewing could be a different. A different task done by seamstresses. So the journeyman tailors would work for the master tailors, and they would be given cutout pieces and have to stitch them together for a fee that was also set by law. And at one point, the work of the journeyman tailors became so unmanageable because the workload increased so much after the court returned that they revolted, which is incredibly unusual in early modern Spain. And there was this rebellion of the journeyman tailors, which was then swiftly put down, and their working conditions became worse than ever. And so the strike didn't get them anything. And interestingly, the wages of the journeyman tailors were lower than those of many other associated professions, like embroiderers or hat makers.
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A
So. So fascinating. So you write that fashion was always important to Spanish royals, but that it took on a new role and entered a new era under King Philip iv. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
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C
Yes. So Philip iv, really, from the Very beginning of his reign made fashion politics. And within a couple of years of coming to the throne, he imposed a new law that was incredibly controversial, which outlawed those enormous rough collars that had been worn during his father's reign, the reign of Philip iii. And those rough collars had come to symbolize all the sort excess decadence of this period in the early 1600s in Spain under Philip III. And you can imagine the critiques of these rough callers talking about how, well, you know, back in the day when Spanish men were really manly and conquered the Americas, they weren't worrying about these kinds of roughs, and now they're effeminate and. And they don't do anything. So. So Philip IV comes to the throne and outlaws the rough, and he then himself models this very radically new style of men's dress, which is a very sober, plain black suit, the only accessory really being a very plain, flat, white linen collar, which is then worn up high on the neck on a support structure called a golia. And to appear at the Spanish court after this law was imposed, you absolutely had to wear this style of dress that was worn by the king himself. And so from the beginning of his reign, he set this new tone in contrast to the reign of his father. And he established the look of Spanish men that would last for generations and would actually outlast Philip iv. You still had men dressing in this, what by this point was an incredibly antiquated costume. Well into the 18th century, any functionary or bureaucrat still had to wear that costume, that golia and the black suit. And so this had a really long lasting impact. But what it also did was it just set this tone in Philip IV's court of using fashion to make political statements, using laws to govern fashion, which he did more than a lot of his predecessors and successors. And Philip IV's reign is so defined by the looks of the clothes from that time period.
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A
Yeah. And can you talk a little bit more about court etiquette and formality and what role dress played in that? Because, again, incredibly significant role in the daily happenings of court life.
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C
Yes. So the Spanish court is notorious for its formality, for the rigidity of its etiquette and its protocols, all of which were written down in these books called the Etiquette este Palacio, which are interesting reading. And the fashion had, of course, a lot to do with this, because the styles of what you're wearing are going to govern how you move your body, what you can and can't do physically. And Spanish fashion during this time period is notoriously stiff, rigid, heavy, cumbersome, very artificial, both for men and women alike. I think we think of the women's garments as being so restrictive, with these enormous farthingales and these really tight corsets. The men's clothes were just as restrictive. And in fact, you have a lot of men complaining in the 17th century about how uncomfortable those golias were about how their pants were so tight they couldn't even walk. And so men and women alike are both very confined by their clothes. And this really fits with that rigid decorum that was required at the court.
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A
So, of course, we're going to talk about the queen's royal tailor today. But I'm just curious. Did King Philip IV have a royal tailor as well?
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C
He did, and he was a disaster. King Philip IV inherited a tailor named Juan Varela. And of course, these. These positions at the court were hereditary. And just like sometimes, you know, if a royal position was inherited, you might not always get the best person for the job. The same thing with the tailor. And so the tailor that King Philip IV inherited is a guy named Juan de Varela. He turns up in a lot of the Chronicles of Madrid, not for his skill as a tailor, but rather because he's always getting embroiled in fights and romantic escapades at the court. And at one point, he killed a man who had been sent to kill him because he'd been flirting with the man's wife. And Juan de Varela, he eventually is, after quite a while in office, is fired because he had been stealing fabrics meant for the king's wardrobe and pawning them. And that was finally the last straw. But what's so interesting is that these employees of the royal household were really like an ex part of the extended royal family, and they couldn't just be let go. And so even though Varela lost his position as the king's tailor, they still found a job for him, basically as a doorman in the queen's household. And it's very funny. There's this little document by an advisor to the king who writes, and he says, look, this is the perfect job for vanilla. All he has to do is stand by a door. And that's basically all he was qualified to do. So basically what happens, and since he has this really inept tailor, there are these interim tailors who actually do the job. And eventually the interim tailor gets the real job.
- [29:03]
A
So fascinating.
- [29:04]
C
Philip IV had pretty bad luck with his tailors. The queens did a lot better with Matteo Aguado.
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B
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- [29:28]
A
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- [29:57]
B
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- [30:13]
A
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- [30:47]
B
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- [31:12]
A
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- [31:31]
B
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- [31:57]
A
I kind of want to just give our listeners an idea of how vividly you bring this world to life for us in the book. You write, for instance, about the distinction between Spanish and European fashions when talking about the arrival of the French Princess Elizabeth of Bourbon bride to the then Prince Philip, she came in 1613. You feature in the book a portrait from a few years earlier in which she's wearing the very distinguished French style, which is a low cut bodice, a lace collar worn high behind her neck. You write about how she's wearing that over a wheel shaped farthingale. But once she comes to Spain, her name has hispanicized and so is her wardrobe transformed at the hands of the then court tailor Francisco Di Soria, who you write, quote, made her a new Spanish wardrobe with dresses in a rainbow of colors, green, blue, pink, white, and one dress with a matching cloak made from silk the color of egg yolk. So Soria will dress Isabel through a series of subsequent transformations. You write about in November 1620, when she turned 18 and consummated her marriage to Prince Philip, Soria made her first dress to be worn with chopines, which are those tall cork soled shoes that actually marked a married woman's status. And then Sorio's reign as the royal court tailor is followed by now we're making our way to our subject today, Mateo Aguado, who arrives on October 14, 1630 at just 25 years old. He's sworn into the coveted and prestigious role as the Queen's tailor, hand selected by Queen Isabelle herself after her previous tailor had died. So can you tell us about Mateo's new to him at least very distinguished role at court and what was expected of him at this time. And then we'll dive into what actually types of fashions he's making for her.
- [33:47]
C
Okay, great. So I think the most important thing to realize is that in Spanish society at this time, proximity to a royal person was the key to power. And no one has greater proximity to the queen perhaps than her tailor. So Aguado, as soon as he's sworn in as tailor to the queen, I think a really interesting detail is that he gets married in a couple of weeks of, of being sworn in as tailor to the queen. And the reason for this I think is because he was, as the Queen's tailor, going to be one of the only men and perhaps the only non aristocratic man to have access to the Queen's inner sanctum within the palace. And men who had access to these private rooms, palace, had to be men of good standing and married men. And so Aguado very quickly got married to the daughter of a local tailor, who I suspect may have been the master with whom he apprenticed, although this isn't documented yet. And so Aguado is one of, again, very, very few people who has access to the Queen. In fact, according to the palace etiquette, he's required to be present for the daily ritual of dressing the Queen. And so he is really, really in the presence of the Queen very frequently. And in terms of what he is then supposed to do, he had this incredibly varied portfolio of tasks. Of course, he's making the Queen's wardrobe, but he's also altering her clothing. And I think, to me, one of the most fascinating details was discovering the role that the tailor played when the Queen was pregnant, which was most of the time. And he would alter her garments when she was pregnant to accommodate her growing belly and breasts. And then after she gave birth, he would then alter her garments again to reduce them. And so he was present and really in the most intimate moments of the Queen's life and played a really important role in shaping the Queen's image, no matter what was happening in her life at these various stages of her career as a queen.
- [36:02]
A
Yeah. And I really want to dig into the process and cycle of Matteo's work, which, again, just speaks to the extraordinary amount of work and research you did in this book, is that you're able to construct that for us. But before, I'd love if you could just paint a picture of what women were wearing at this time, specifically, obviously, the Queen as the ultimate fashion setter at this period. What is the fashion for women? What is Queen Isabel wearing these types of garments that he's making for her?
- [36:28]
C
Well, so one of the really interesting things I learned is that what we're seeing in the portraits of the Queen is not what she was wearing on a daily basis. What we see in the portraits is a very formal court garment called a saya indera, which was made of two pieces. There was a upper body garment called a cuera, which had hanging sleeves, and then the skirt had a very long train. And a dress like this took 15 to 20 yards of fabric, if you can imagine. So the tailor only makes a few of these Every year for the Queen. And these were the garments that she wore on very special occasions, major religious holidays and sitting for portraits. The garments that he made for her in bulk that she wore on a daily basis was a three piece dress which was comprised of a doublet with sleeves, a floor length skirt without a train, and an overgown called a ropa, which is a garment with a collar, a floor length garment. It was a very modest garment and also it was a garment that would show off a great deal of decoration because it was full length. And so the majority of things that Aguado and his team are making are these three piece dresses for the Queen. But he's also making, he's making everything she wears. And so this includes nightgowns and the gowns that she would wear to give birth in and basically everything.
- [37:54]
A
And just going back to women's fashion in general, I mean, obviously we're at the highest tier of fashion at this time. But how did Spanish women's Spanish fashion differ from the rest of Europe, or at least specifically France? Because I talked about it a little bit in terms of the context of the lower bodice and the wheeled farthingale. Can you just talk a little bit more about those distinctions and why the Spanish court was wanting to distinguish itself in general?
- [38:18]
C
Yes, well, so Spanish fashion, for those of you who've, who've studied this period of fashion in say the 16th century, Spanish fashion was all the rage and really dominated the courts of Europe when Spain was at the height of its imperial power. So the second half of the 16th century, and that was this sort of iconic look of this very cone shaped lower half of the body worn over a farthingale called a verdugado, and then a very tight upper body garment. And where things really start to shift is that the fashion trends in France and England in the 17th century become much looser, much more natural, much more low cut. And they eventually get rid of the farthingale entirely. And Spanish fashion at the same time really digs in with its traditions and we see it getting more rigid, more structured, more artificial. So it's going in the absolute opposite direction of the fashion trends that you're seeing elsewhere in Europe. And at the time, fashion really, I think I've said this before already, but fashion really was politics. And these national styles were seen to really be emblematic of national character. And so to dress in Spanish was not just to look like a Spaniard, but it was something much bigger. And in fact, I think a really funny story was that there was One occasion where a French spy was caught in Spain and a chronicler reporting on this said that he was so incredibly clever, he had dressed in Spanish style. And this was just seen as just this brilliant, brilliant spy tactic because it was so shocking that you would dress in somebody else's national dress. That was a really extraordinary thing to do.
- [40:05]
A
Yes. And of course, we'll be posting images to accompany this episode. Dress listeners, and of course, you'll just also gonna have to get your hands on this book to see. But just looking at portraits of Queen Isabel, she has a ruff and then this really highly structured bodice which has that very distinctive point at the base which extends over this cone shaped skirt. Right. So it's a very distinctive silhouette and something I, of course, will illustrate with images on our Instagram, so you can really see what the differences are we're talking about. But it's all also fascinating. Also so fascinating. Something we love to emphasize on dress is this is a pre industrial era. So from those incredibly extravagant fabrics to the dresses themselves, everything is being made with people's own two hands, which is just remarkable when you think about it. Okay, so I would really love to dig into the process and cycle of Mateo's work. What did that process look like for him and his staff? Was there like a daily routine or what was he kind of doing on a daily basis?
- [41:10]
C
Well, so the Queen's tailor was really the project manager for making her wardrobe. And so Matteo Aguado, and I think this is really important, wasn't just a tailor, he was a dress designer and he was designing the Queen's dresses. And in fact, there's evidence that he was paid to make drawings of the decorations to adorn her clothing. And I think this is really important because it shows a number of things. One of them being that he's doing something new and original, and another that this is valued and compensated. And so Aguado is designing the Queen's dresses, and then there's this whole team of people who are actually carrying them out and making them. And so Aguado has a workshop which is very likely based at his home, not at the palace itself. And in this home workshop, he has journeyman tailors who are working for him and also dozens of seamstresses who are actually doing the sewing. And he also has some specialists that he pays to work on particular garments. There's a woman who quilts some skirts for wintertime. There's a specialist who does pricking of fabrics. And so you've got all of these different people involved in the tailor's workshop. And then in addition to the tailor's work, he's then having to work very closely with the queen's embroiderer, who is responsible for decorating the fabrics and making the ornaments that are being attached to the dresses. And these very, very probably seem to be then based on Aguado's designs for those garments. And so you've got Taylor's workshop working with the embroiderer's workshop, and then there are lots of other officials who are involved as well. I have absolutely no doubt that he must be working closely with the queen's farthingale maker, because the skirts obviously have to fit over the farthingales. And there are the silk merchants who supply all of these materials to these workshops. So there's this whole ecosystem of artisans of all different kinds who are employed by the court, all working together.
- [43:20]
A
Yeah. And I think we'll talk more about silk merchants in a minute, because that is one of the archives that you use, because they kept incredibly detailed records. And that was a lot of the way that you're able to reconstruct what exactly went into these garments, which is just remarkable. Dress listeners, if you love weave structure, fabric types, velvet pile descriptions, this book is also for you because you go into that in remarkable detail. So just to give listeners an example about his production. So in 1631, you write that he made 23 dresses, two formal saya anteras with accessories, a dressing gown, several petticoats, waistcoats, aprons. And I was surprised to learn at just how quickly these dresses were made. You write that sometimes they were even produced overnight. And you write that many of these dresses don't survive because they were never meant to last, which I think is fascinating.
- [44:12]
C
Yeah, Well, I think what. What you can extrapolate from this is that a dress, like some of the most formal dresses made for the most special occasions, would literally be made overnight. And you might have 50 seamstresses at a time. You can just imagine this. They're working by candlelight overnight to get this dress ready for the queen to wear the next day. And so this is where having a background in sewing is really helpful, because you can imagine. Okay, well, how is it you're going about making a dress overnight using 15 to 20 yards of fabric with this enormous train? Well, the only way you can possibly do that is by making these really long basting stitches. Right. This is not a moment for incredibly detailed, painstaking, tiny stitch work. And so I was actually really delighted to confirm this. I had a Chance to talk to a fashion conservator who worked on a bunch of 18th century French dresses for the mitt. And she confirmed to me, oh, yeah, when you look at these dresses up close, they're made with really long running stitches. And so that, that confirmed for me that, yes, these are made in great haste. And what that means then is that they can also be just taken apart just as easily and the fabrics and the trimmings reused to make something else.
- [45:18]
A
Again, that is just so fascinating. We've talked about that in the context of, like, Charles Frederick Worth Designs, which, again, it speaks to that myth of the haute couture and, like the high luxury. Right. The reality of these dresses as one thing versus kind of our imagination about how they were made is another.
- [45:35]
C
And where, I mean, where the real painstaking work came in was making the fabrics.
- [45:39]
A
Exactly.
- [45:40]
C
That's what really mattered. And the fabrics would take an incredibly long time to weave. And. And these dresses were really designed to showcase these incredibly sumptuous, luxurious textiles. And so that's. That was, I think, really the. The point of them. And other than that, the dresses themselves were really ephemeral constructions.
- [46:00]
A
Yes. And actually that leads me to my next question, which, or just comment, which is about the Alamades or lace buttons, which are these functional and decorative closures that decorate the Queen's wardrobe and were designed by Mateo and fabricated by the royal embroiderer, who you also name, which is Geronimo de Negrilla, and you write about how he produced them in quote, prodigious quantities. A dress for the Queen could have anywhere from 380 to 712 Alamadas in everything from black silk, silver and gold thread, sometimes adorned with false jewels or black glass. So you provide this incredible amount of detail about these items of adornment, which you've clearly spent a lot of time analyzing and which also speaks to something you've kind of mentioned. But I'm hoping we can talk about in a little more detail, which is that you resurrect the work of more than just Mateo's life. You also talk about how he is just one of the first among peers in the elite group of artisans who worked on the royal wardrobe. Other officieles de monos who were involved in dressing the Queen included an embroiderer, gold wire drawer glover, farthingale maker, shoemaker, cord maker, and trimming makers. And I'm hoping if you can just introduce us to some of the other architects of the Queen's appearance. I know you spoke about a Few of them just now, but maybe we could talk a little bit more about them. Because especially someone like the Keeper of the Jewels and Wardrobes, which was actually an official title at this time, which is just fascinating.
- [47:28]
C
Well, the Keeper of the Jewels and Wardrobe was no laughing matter. He was the top level aristocrat who governed the Queen's wardrobe. And this is the guy who Aguaro had a some kind of problem with that ended up with Aguado being tossed in jail for a period of time. Under the Keeper of the Wardrobe, you then had these non aristocratic officiales de manos, and there could only be one of each. And so you have the embroiderer, you have the gold wire drawer, the tailor, and then it's under them that you have all of these other unnamed, completely unknown workers who are laboring under them. And the way the structure of this is, I think, really interesting, which is that then the official de manos, who's the person who has this formal appointment at the court, then out of his own pocket is paying all these other employees who are working for his workshop. And so when he's submitting his accounts, requesting payment for his work, it's including in his costs of all this other labor that he's himself paying for. But so you have all these different individuals involved. And these positions of an official de manos are the ones who actually are the direct employees from the court are incredibly valuable positions. They come with all sorts of perks, an annual salary usually, as well as being paid by the peace. And so these are really, really, really good jobs in this society. And so the people who have these positions are constantly jockeying to make sure that they can pass them on to their descendants. There's a lot of intermarriage among these different court artisans. And it's really just this whole world in and of itself, which I think is just this fascinating social group that we haven't really learned that much about before. I think most studies of the court of Philip IV focus either on the royal family or there are some really great social historians who have worked on labor. But this in between group who has a foot in the court and a foot in town has fallen through the cracks up until now.
- [49:40]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And I will say I think there is a shift happening within the field of fashion studies and fashion history that we're seeing more and more of this type of work that you're doing and setting a very high bar about how to do, because people are really interested in that, in the everyday working people. Right. Because that's who most of us can relate to. That's who most of us would have been in these societies. And so it's just so remarkable that you were able to bring so many of them to light. Because even man, even Mateo, as high profile as he was at the time, he had completely fallen into obscurity. And yet his work is front and center in these incredibly famous Diego Velazquez portraits that would not have existed without him. So this book is remarkable for that and many, many other reasons. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast. Smart move. Being financially savvy.
- [50:35]
C
Smart move.
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A
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C
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- [51:27]
A
So at the top of the episode, we talked a little bit about women in the context of fashion. One of the rare women's names that comes into play is when we're talking about the scaffolding of rigid undergarments that are under Queen Isabella Bourbon's wardrobe. And that is in the context of the farthingale. And that is the farthingale maker Maria Jimenez and her son Diego Lopez. Can you talk just a little bit about what those undergarments were? Because they're so fascinating, especially in the context of Queen Isabel's wardrobe.
- [51:57]
C
Specifically, yes, I would love to. I think this was, for me, one of the really fun things to figure out in the process of this research was what goes under those dresses that we see in portraits. Because of course, we have very, very few images of any of these kinds of garments. And so in the case of Queen Isabella Bourbon, she's queen during this moment of transition from that stiff cone shaped skirt to the sort of bell shaped skirt that's achieved with this new kind of farthingale called a guardian Fante. So talking about the farthingales and the farthingale makers, these are, this is an official post at the court. And under Isabella Bourbon, she has, first of all, she has her farthingales made by this woman, Maria Jimenez, who you mentioned, who most likely inherited that post from a husband, I suspect. And then she works also with her son, Diego Lopez, who eventually inherits that post and becomes the queen's farthingale maker. And there are some documents relating what they made. They're very brief and they don't give as much information as we would like them to. But we can tell from those documents what the farthingales were made from, which is a lot of fun. So the wire and the whalebone and the cords that are being used to construct these farthingales. And aside from the farthingales, there's a lot more going on under those skirts as well. There is also layers of underskirts of all different kinds. And then of course, we have the corsets, which are made with whalebone. And one of my absolute favorite details from the documents was learning that almost always these undergarments were made from the colors of flesh and blood, from shades of pink and red. And there was a reason for this, which was that these were colors that were thought to have health giving properties. And since they were worn closer to the skin, this was seen as being really important. Of course, they're not worn directly on the skin because you have the white shirt that's worn under everything as the very first layer. But I think this creates such a vivid picture that when we're seeing a portrait of the Queen dressed in this very somber black dress, there's a flash of crimson underneath those skirts. There's a lot more going on under that surface.
- [54:10]
A
And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you write about how it's connected to their beliefs in health. Right. That somehow this imparted healthy properties to her by wearing that sort of color.
- [54:20]
C
Exactly. It's supposed to be health giving. And of course, what we're really talking about when we're talking about being concerned about women's health is their fertility. Right, Right. Their ability to bear children. And there was a lot of concern about the role that clothing would play in either helping or harming the process of a queen giving birth to male heirs, which is of course, her primary purpose.
- [54:42]
A
So fascinating. And do you know anything about this? Is just my own curiosity, because I find it fascinating how these garments were stored because these are massive structures. Where would they have been stored?
- [54:53]
C
You know, this is something I was really trying to figure out and I was frustrated in my efforts. I don't know too much about this, although there is a really wonderful article by Sofia Rodriguez Bernice, who's the director of the Decorative Arts Museum in Madrid. And she talks about that there were special cases made of cowhide designed to store the farthingales. And so you can just imagine these cases in the shapes of the farthingales that would have had them inside. And so if you want to learn about the various coffers and storage chests, I highly recommend Sophia's article, which we could link to in the notes.
- [55:31]
A
Yes, absolutely. That is so, so fascinating. Mattea was not just responsible for dressing the queen. Who else was he making clothes for?
- [55:40]
C
Everyone. It is incredible how many people he made clothes for. In addition to being responsible for absolutely everything that the queen wore, Matteo Aguado also dressed all of the royal children. And he made clothing as gifts that the queen would give. And this included some really mundane kinds of everyday workwear for the members of her staff, her household staff. It also included gifts of clothing very occasionally for the king himself. And so this means that Aguata was dressing everyone from the girl who swept the floors in the palace to King Philip iv, which is an incredible range. He also made clothing if there were dignitaries visiting the Spanish court from abroad, like the Princess of Carignano, who's a really interesting story, I think, and had a big influence on Spanish fashion during her visit. Matteo Iguana was responsible for making her a very special, luxurious garment to welcome her to Madrid. He also made a lot of clothing for sculptures of the Virgin Mary, which were devotional images that were dressed in real clothes made from incredibly sumptuous fabrics that were pious gifts from Queen Isabel. And, I mean, he even made clothing for the toy soldiers and the dolls that were played with by the royal children. So he had an incredible range of work to do, made thousands of garments. And I think what's really amazing is in this prodigious career, he made thousands and thousands of garments, and not a single one survives today.
- [57:16]
A
Remarkable. Or is it possible they survived, but the provenance has been lost? Would that have happened? Because what is happening to her wardrobe once she's worn and is no longer wearing it again? Does it get passed down?
- [57:28]
C
You know, I suspect that there's really nothing out there. It's possible. But if you follow the trajectory of clothing during this time period, you see that things were. The fabric, again, was so valuable that a dress would be passed on once it was no longer to be worn, it would be remade. I have cases that I found where a queen's dress might be remade three different times into different garments for her children. So you're going to basically keep reusing it, remaking it up until there's just sort of nothing left. But again, it's. Who knows? There could be something somewhere. In fact, it was very exciting. I was visiting, looking at the textile storage collection at the Chicago Art Institute this spring with Melinda Watt, who's the wonderful director of their textiles department. And they had a box of fragments from a donation to the museum that included this amazing piece of fabric that imitates absolutely identically a very distinctive, rich fabric in a portrait of Queen Margaret of Austria from the early 1600s. And so I can't imagine that's anything but a piece of the dress of Queen Margaret of Austria. So maybe there are some fragments of the dresses that Aguado made for Queen Isabelle. But again, that's only going to be recognizable if it's a really distinctive fabric. And that's such a rarity.
- [58:49]
A
So fascinating. Well, dress listeners, we have only scratched the very rich textural surface of our topic today. We still have so much more to talk about. So Amanda is actually going to be back on Friday's episode for part two to continue this incredibly fascinating conversation. Amanda, I look forward to talking to you again soon.
- [59:10]
C
Thank you. I can't wait.
- [59:12]
B
Amanda, thank you for joining us for part one of this fascinating two part conversation. In part two, Amanda is going to join us to discuss the fashions Matteo designed for Mariana of Austria, who Philip IV married after his beloved Isabel's untimely death. We're also going to take a further look into the political implications of fashion at the court of Philip Ivan, while taking a closer look at Mateo's most famous work as featured and one of the most important pieces of art history. And you know, I love this. Cass Velazquez's Las Meninas, which centers around Mariana and Philip's five year old daughter, the Infanta Margarete Teresa, who was wearing none other than Matteo Aguado Couture. And Cass, you do not know this, but we look at a study of this on my tour of the Met. Ooh. Yeah. It's not the entire painting, but it is a painted portrait by Velasquez of her face. He was working out some details. So that's on my Met tour if you guys want to join.
- [60:19]
A
And now you can add some Matteo Aguado trivia to your Met tour, April, because this is so fascinating, the role that he played in all of this. So we are also, in part two of this conversation, going to really zoom in, as April just did, on the hyper focused details that Amanda gifts us with in this book. So she goes behind the scenes and under the Queen's Skirts, for instance, to discuss the massive understructures that sustained these architectural feats of Spanish women's fashion in the 17th century. We will learn about the fabrics, trimmings and other decorations that made up these women's material worlds. We have so much to discuss. You are not going to want to miss part two.
- [61:00]
B
Until then, Dress is near. May you consider the many nameless creators of fashion and your favorite fashion portraits from history. Next time you get dressed, you can get your hands on a copy of Amanda's book Spanish Fashion and the Age of Velasquez, A Tailor of the Court of Philip IV by heading over to the link on our show Notes for our dress bookshelf on bookshop.org Here you will find Amanda's book and over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles.
- [61:30]
A
And dressedhistory.com is where you will find all of Dressed latest offering including the aforementioned fashion history Friday Nights at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with April and my current class offerings which are what Women Wore to the revolution, 1930s to 1960s and Warren to Dressing the Summer Olympic Athlete, which is the first class in a series. We hope to do more of the Picturing Dress series which is going to visually illustrate new and past dress podcast episodes.
- [61:58]
B
Speaking of which, which we are rapidly approaching our 500th episode of Dressed Listeners and we would love to celebrate with you. So in preparation for this, we're going to take a wee summer hiatus in a few weeks, but when we return in August, we hope that you will join us for a free live recording of our 500th episode on August 11th. Again, this event is going to be free but space will be limited. So head over to DressedHistory.com to reserve your spot for the festivities.
- [62:31]
A
Yes, yes, yes. We are so excited to celebrate with you and we love hearing from you. So don't hesitate to reach out to us@hellorusthistory.com you can always direct message us on Instagram @dresspodcast, which is of course where you will find images and reels to accompany each week's episode. If you want to find the Instagram content specifically connected to this episode, check out the hashtag dressed495 and dressed496. As always, thank you so much for your continued support. More dress coming your way next week. The History of Fashion is a production of Dressed Media. Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
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B
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
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A
Cut the camera. They see us.
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C
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Fairy underwritten by.
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A
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