All is fair in love, war, and fashion: from court fashion to fast fashion
Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez: A Tailor at the Court of Philip IV by Amanda Wunder (Yale University Press, 2024)
Reviewed by Saija Wilson
Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez: A Tailor at the Court of Philip IV charts the life and work of Mateo Aguado over his tenure as sastre de cámara de la reina, or head tailor to the Queen of Spain. Amanda Wunder, a cultural historian, begins her work of excavating Aguado by setting up a juxtaposition between Aguado and renowned Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, who were both “engaged in the grand project of fashioning the royal image” during the seventeenth century (13). Both men were well-known to their contemporaries and held important roles in the Spanish court, but Aguado has since fallen into obscurity. Wunder questions why the tailor whose creations are depicted in Velázquez’s paintings has been forgotten while the paintings remain extremely popular.
An indication of how forgotten Aguado and other tailors have been comes from the 2021 Madrid art installation, “Meninas Madrid Gallery,” which consisted of painted fiberglass figures that were placed around the city center. Wunder notes that these figures employed the iconic silhouette seen in Velázquez’s Queen Mariana of Austria (“Mariana in Black and Silver”) (1652). That silhouette was achieved by Aguado’s tailoring, but the installation references Velázquez—“meninas” harkens back to Velázquez’s work The Family of Philip IV, now known simply as Las Meninas. This obscures the role Aguado played in constructing the famous silhouette and gives Velázquez credit for what seems to have been beyond his control.
In 1606, one year before Aguado’s birth, the Spanish royal court moved back to Madrid, making it the Spanish Empire’s center of fashion once again. A robust network of merchants and artisans were necessary to clothe the Spanish court, which may have been what encouraged Aguado’s family to relocate there in 1611. Not much is known about Aguado in the first twenty years of his life, but Wunder uses documents from after he became head tailor to reconstruct what she can. It is possible that Aguado was exposed to tailoring before his family moved to Madrid and, after arriving, his family’s home in the parish of San Ginés, Madrid’s garment district, would have only further encouraged him to pursue the craft.
In the years that followed his rise as a tailor, Aguado would marry and remarry, have children and amass a fortune in movable property that would later be auctioned off after his death to pay debts. Wunder describes a precarious balance of debit and credit dictated by propriety. Aguado’s widow had to auction off his belongings before asking the queen to dispense back-pay owed to Aguado from the beginning of his career as her tailor. It was not until thirty-two years after Aguado’s death that his family received the final installment of his wages, long after his creations were worn by the queen and her household.
In Wunder’s effort to “put the tailor back in the picture,” she has written a love letter to the undercredited labor of seventeenth-century artisans whose creations were immortalized in paint for the appreciation of viewers to come (17). By focusing on craft, Wunder introduces us to the world of court artisans and the factors influencing the work of those navigating Madrid’s fashion industry at large. For example, we see how something like war affected fashion, as Spain was at war for a large portion of Aguado’s career. Costly wars required decreases in spending, especially on clothing, and even the prohibition of popular materials if they were imported from hostile countries. The queen’s clothing had to signal to society the priorities of the royal family and it was Aguado’s job to ensure nothing was lost in translation.
As head tailor to the queen, Aguado’s business extended inside and outside of court. Wunder likens him to a project manager as he was in charge of purchasing from the many merchants that supplied the royal family and for coordinating the work of other court artisans whose creations would be incorporated into the queen's wardrobe and/or that of the royal children. Court artisans were specialists in their chosen craft who were given a title signifying their office. Together they made up a team of oficiales de manos who served the royal family. In this period, it was common for many positions within the royal households to be passed down in families. Ensuring the abilities of all oficiales de manos was necessary and accomplished through guild systems that set requirements for all who were practicing a craft.
Achieving mastery was an extensive process that Wunder outlines. Each prospective tailor began with an apprenticeship to a master tailor, then received further instruction as a journeyman in a master tailor’s shop, and finally attained the title master tailor following the successful completion of a guild examination. Aguado went through this process and may have had high prospects, but it is unlikely he knew that he would soon find himself at the height of his profession. Unlike others, Aguado did not belong to a family with established connections of employment in the royal household. Instead, in the 1620s Aguado came to work for Francisco de Soria, the sastre de cámara de la reina, and became his successor when he died in 1630, without a child to inherit his position.
Throughout his tenure as sastre de cámara de la reina, Aguado maintained detailed accounts of the work he did for the queen’s household. This work included dressing the queen and the royal children as mentioned above but it also required Aguado to create garments as gifts from the queen for diplomatic visitors or charitable organizations and as payments or gifts for household staff. This secondary purpose underscores the value and significance of clothing during this period. Wunder notes that the cost of fabric was much more, sometimes fifteen to thirty times more, than the cost of the tailor’s labor and, as such, when appropriate, found second life after the queen wore it.
Today, it is difficult to comprehend the value that fabric had during the early modern period. Many, including Sofi Thanhauser in her work Worn: A People’s History of Clothing (2022), have connected mass production of clothing to changing knowledge and sentiments about clothing. Thanhauser asserts what we may notice ourselves, that “fast fashion” has made clothing disposable. In Aguado’s time, a nascent ready-to-wear market, selling pre-sewn clothing in small or large sizes, emerged to meet clothing needs and was seen as dangerous competition for traditional made-to-measure tailoring. Today, ready-to-wear has outstripped tailormade clothing with the latter relegated to being a luxury that many can not afford.
This book encourages us to pause and consider the tailor, the laborer whose creations eclipsed him. By focusing on the tailor we are also able to center that which might seem mundane: clothing. By doing so and by showing us a time where its social, political, and economic power were arguably more apparent, we are invited to reflect on what we wear, its value and its cost. In her book, Wunder notes that “[t]hroughout early modern Europe, fashion played an outsized role at the royal courts, where complex garments and a wearer’s command over them communicated rank, wealth, and political allegiance” (43).
At first glance, the topic of this book may seem only relevant to historians or those interested in stories about unrelatable royals. However, just as fashion played an important role in politics, society and the economy during Aguado’s life, it is similarly relevant today. If you care about the convergence of the political, social, and economic arenas, this will interest you. If you care about the roots of the fashion industry today, this book will captivate you. This book engages the importance of labor and the value we assign it. Going back to the seventeenth century invites us to examine the way people related to their belongings and to reconsider how we approach ours. Perhaps this book will inspire you to make something, wear it and see how much more you value it when you can quantify the work put into making it. If not, you can find solace in a beautifully constructed narrative accompanied by a selection of photographs of stunning pieces of seventeenth-century material culture that provide a nice escape from the rigors of everyday life.
Saija Wilson has studied history and library science with a focus on archives. Right now she helps make special collections materials available online.
