Fashioning Spain is a cultural history of Spanish fashion in the 20th and 21st centuries, a period of significant social, political, and economic upheaval. As Spain moved from dictatorship to democracy and, most recently, to the digital age, fashion has experienced seismic shifts. The chapters in this collection reveal how women empowered themselves through fashion choices, detail Balenciaga's international stardom, present female photographers challenging gender roles under Franco's rule, and uncover the politicization of the mantilla. In the visual culture of Spanish fashion, tradition and modernity coexist and compete, reflecting society's changing affects. Using a range of case studies and approaches, this collection explores fashion in films, comics from la Movida, Rosalía's music videos, and both brick-and-mortar and virtual museums. It demonstrates that fashion is ripe with historical meaning, and offers unique insights into the many facets of Spanish cultural life.

Fashioning Spanish Cinema provides a critical examination of the intersections between fashion, costume design, and Spanish cinema.

Based on years of archival research in Madrid and Barcelona, this interdisciplinary study offers a fresh approach to understanding how men visualized themselves and their place in a nation that struggled to modernize after nearly a century of civil war, colonial entanglement, and imperial loss. Masculine Figures is the first study to provide a comprehensive overview of competing models of masculinity in nineteenth-century Spain, and it is particularly novel in its treatment of Catalan texts and previously unstudied evidence (e.g., department store catalogs, commercial advertisements, fashion plates, and men’s tailoring journals). Fictional masculinity performs a symbolic role in representing and negotiating the contradictions male novelists often encountered in their attempts to professionalize not only as writers, but also as businessmen, professors, lawyers, and politicians. Through specific and recurring figures like the student, the priest, the businessman, and the heir, male novelists portray and represent an increasingly middle-class world at odds with the values and virtues it inherited from an imperial Spanish past, and those it imported from more industrialized nations like England and France. The visual culture of the time and place marks the material turn in middle-class masculinity and sets the stage for discussions of race and sexuality.

Majismo, a cultural phenomenon that embodied the popular aesthetic in Spain from the second half of the eighteenth century, served as a vehicle to “regain” Spanish heritage. As expressed in visual representations of popular types participating in traditional customs and wearing garments viewed as historically Spanish, majismo conferred on Spanish “citizens” the pictorial ideal of a shared national character. In Framing Majismo, Tara Zanardi explores nobles’ fascination with and appropriation of the practices and types associated with majismo, as well as how this connection cultivated the formation of an elite Spanish identity in the late 1700s and aided the Bourbons’ objective to fashion themselves as the legitimate rulers of Spain. In particular, the book considers artistic and literary representations of the majo and the maja, purportedly native types who embodied and performed uniquely Spanish characteristics. Such visual examples of majismo emerge as critical and contentious sites for navigating eighteenth-century conceptions of gender, national character, and noble identity. Zanardi also examines how these bodies were contrasted with those regarded as “foreign,” finding that “foreign” and “national” bodies were frequently described and depicted in similar ways. She isolates and uncovers the nuances of bodily representation, ultimately showing how the body and the emergent nation were mutually constructed at a critical historical moment for both.

By the 1780s in the city of Barcelona alone, more than 150 factories shipped calicoes to every major city in Spain and across the Atlantic. This book narrates the lives of families on both sides of the Atlantic who profited from the craze for calicoes, and in doing so helped the Spanish empire to flourish in the eighteenth century.

An in-depth study of early 20th century social conditions and cultural trends in Britain that constructed the popular image of the "modern lesbian"