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Material girls--and boys: dressing up in Cervantes (1).(clothing and costume in works of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra)

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From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society ofAmerica
Date: 20040322
Author:McKim-Smith, Gridley; Welles, Marcia L.

Costume is a language. It is no more misleading than the graphs drawn by demographers and price historians.

Braudel, 235.

When moralists speak of costume in early modern Spain, they criticize their fellow citizens for dressing up. They dress down their male and especially their female subjects for the sin of vanity, and critics today echo this ethic when they speak disapprovingly of consumerism, betraying a nostalgia for a bygone, precapitalist era and revulsion towards contemporary culture. They are heirs in this respect to Don Quijote, like him longing for the Golden ...