Recently, thirteen bronze sculptures appeared in Venice, marching single file down Saint Mark’s Square in half-moon wigs and wide pannier skirts. Installed for the sixtieth Venice Biennale, Manolo Valdés’s sculptures Las Meninas a San Marco were featureless but instantly recognizable as the Infanta, María Teresa of Spain, portrayed so many times by Diego Velázquez. The seventeenth-century Spanish painter might be credited with popularizing the Infanta’s silhouette, but, as Amanda Wunder demonstrates in her impressive Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez, the real credit goes to the royal tailor Mateo Aguado.
Wunder’s book offers a comprehensive look at the connection between fashion and politics through the art of Velázquez and his contemporaries. Her work illuminates not only the idiosyncrasies of the period’s fashion but also the economics of royal dressing, court protocol, diplomacy, the domestic life of the royals, and, not least, how one man and a score of artisans crafted the public personae of King Philip IV and his family.
Portraits of Philip IV typically show a tall, lantern-jawed figure with red hair, full lips, and upturned mustache, a smug king dressed in silk hose and brocade doublets. But in Wunder’s book, a different picture emerges, that of a doting father (Philip often described his daughters as “famous bugs”) and a responsive ruler seeking to preserve domestic equilibrium during wartime. One tactic Philip used was promulgating dress reforms and sumptuary laws designed to subdue the Spanish tendency to ostentatious public displays of dress. These reforms included a ban on the “figure of eight” ruff, a starched lace or linen collar, Dutch in origin, worn to indicate wealth and status. As a young man, Prince Philip had sported such a ruff and suits in metallic fabric, but, later, as king, he outlawed virtually all forms of extravagant dress, leading the way in the new austerity with black suits and the valona collar, a simple piece of starched linen that lay flat on the upper shoulders.
Such details might sound minor, but they underpin the larger story of how fashion and politics worked in tandem—hand in glove, one might say—to create a deliberate impression of power, beauty, or rank. At the time of Philip’s rule, Spain was embroiled in the Thirty Years’ War, and dress reforms were tied to efforts to disrupt the trade in imported fabrics from Naples or Venice as well as to appease the socially conservative at home. The capital, Madrid, was the center of a global empire with a court finely attuned to the implications of dress and power. Every public appearance of the royal family was scrutinized and elements of their dress emulated or adapted by the public. As the queen’s tailor from 1630 to 1672, Mateo Aguado was the leading trendsetter.
The fact that so much is known of Aguado’s life is one of the many astonishing aspects of this book. His court career is well documented in the palace archives and, from what Wunder tells us, while his position carried a certain prestige, Aguado was anything but well off. He was typically paid only about 70 percent of the fees he submitted, and it sometimes took as long as a year to receive his wages. Near the end of his life, Aguado wrote to Queen Mother Mariana (Philip IV’s second wife) that the crown owed him wages dating back decades to the sum of 154,000 reales (approximately $7,700). At some point late in his career, Aguado transgressed some nicety of court etiquette and was fired. He was jailed and his name struck from the royal record books, a serious blow after three decades of service. Aguado’s fall from favor lasted only two months before he was fully restored; as Wunder notes, things were tumultuous at court, and the queen’s tailor was needed back on the job.
The stakes for the royal tailor were seldom higher than the trousseau he made for Infanta María Teresa. Affianced to Louis XIV, her double first cousin, María Teresa journeyed to France in 1660 to be married. A series of “promotional portraits” by Velázquez over the years had apprised the future king of his bride’s appearance, and visiting diplomats assured the French court that the Infanta was sufficiently “developed” to be able to conceive an heir. Aguado and his workshop worked at top speed for four months to produce twenty-two dresses in silk, taffeta, wool, and satin, embroidered and trimmed with woven ornaments, braids, bows, and diamonds. (In honor of the occasion, the Infanta was exempt from sumptuary laws.) Aguado had also devised a substitute for the prohibited metallic thread fabric, using instead silvered mica, which created its own sparkling effect. The dresses were packed into specially made trunks and chests, a cargo that required some 5,400 mounts including coaches, litters, and mules. We know as much as we do about the royal entourage because of a series of relaciones, or printed pamphlets, that chronicled every stage of the journey. Wunder frequently mentions the significant role of the relaciones, which serve as lively eyewitness accounts of society life, embellished, to be sure, but with a sense of immediacy and authenticity unmatched by other sources.
Among the many delights of Wunder’s book are the tables detailing Aguado’s dress materials and decorations. These tables—one for dresses for Queen Isabel of Bourbon (Philip’s first wife), another for special-occasion dresses for Queen Mariana, and a third covering María Teresa’s trousseau—are replete with specialty vocabulary for colors, fabrics, and embroidery motifs. Queen Isabel’s dour but sumptuous wardrobe in black and brown served not only to indicate mourning following the death of her brother Louis XIII, but also to telegraph her political power while she ruled Spain in Philip’s absence during wartime. Queen Mariana required dresses for a variety of occasions from birthday celebrations (green ormuzine with silver embroidery), religious observances (Venetian cloth of silver or white taffeta from Valencia embroidered with gold esses), and bullfights (silver, light green, and black camlet from Holland with white lace from Flanders). María Teresa’s treasure trove of dresses came in a rainbow of delicate hues—incarnadine camlet, sky-blue ormuzine, pale yellow satin—and a veritable thicket of flower-themed motifs.
Wunder relates that the French were not impressed with their future queen’s fashion sense; one lady described the Infanta’s wedding dress (white satin with silvered mica) as “horrible” and allowed that although María Teresa was beautiful, her “true beauty could only be revealed once her Spanish garments had been removed and replaced with French dress.” At this time, French fashion favored loose, flowing gowns with a low-cut bodice, sandals, and no makeup. Spanish women preferred three-piece dresses made of stiffened fabric, the extremely wide skirt with farthingale undergarment, high-necked bodices, wigs, and theatrical makeup. Nowhere is the difference clearer than in the pair of tapestries reproduced in the book, one showing Philip IV meeting Louis XIV, the Infanta at the right, her enormous skirt isolating her from everyone else around her. In the second tapestry showing the wedding, María Teresa appears without her farthingale in a French-style dress with a lowcut neckline. At the far left, a knot of French ladies-in-waiting carry the queen’s train and exchange knowing looks.
Velázquez served at court at the same time as Mateo Aguado, but Wunder’s book does not attempt a parallel examination of the painter’s life. Indeed, such an approach would inevitably have relegated the tailor to the portraitist’s shadow. Rather, Wunder has uncovered a sort of “mutual influence” between Aguado and Velázquez: “The clothes that we see in a Velázquez portrait may have been his invention to some degree, but they were firmly grounded in the reality of the royal wardrobe.” For example, when Velázquez painted the king as commander-in-chief in 1644, wearing a heavily embroidered red cassock, he merely suggested the intricate Flemish lace of his collar. As we have seen, Philip’s collars played an outsized role in his public persona; here it was no different with the king’s “campaign collar” indicating his role as leader of the army. Velázquez could have dazzled us with his rendering of delicate lace on red silk, but, rather, he uses a stylistic innovation—one he picked up on his trips to Italy in the 1630s—to reinforce the political purpose of the portrait, one already announced by Aguado’s handiwork.
Although we know much about Aguado life’s, down to the rugs and cushions left behind in his household inventory, we have almost no surviving examples of the dresses he made. Wunder writes that Aguado worked under a “fashion system that was responsive to the politics of the moment.” A dress was made for a particular occasion, often carrying a special message in its color, fabric, or style of embroidery, and once that purpose had been achieved, the dress could not be worn again. It is surprising to learn that the royal dresses, labored over by artisans of rare skill and made of fabrics so valuable that they were secured by the Keeper of the Jewels, were sewn with long stitches so they could be easily taken apart. It would seem that impressive though these garments were, they were as fleeting as the kings and queens and infantas they adorned.