Couture and Consensus: Fashion and Politics in Postcolonial Argentina

INTRODUCTION: Interrogating Fashion

xiii A t the height of the protests in economically devastated Argentina, on December 20, 2001, several prominent authors waited in front of television cameras at the Clásica y Moderna bookstore in Buenos Aires for a special cultural event organized by the Secretaría de Cultura de la Nación and the CámaraArgentina del Libro. For weeks, television advertisements had promoted a “buy one book and get the next free” offer alongside the opportunity to meet with the country’s most celebrated authors.As La Nación would report, not one reader showed up.1 The authors,who included FedericoAndahazi, Juan Forn, Dalmiro Sáenz, Leopoldo Brizuela, MiguelVitagliano, and Carlos Gamerro, initiated an impromptu talk on their country’s political ills. Before reporters, the group quickly came to a consensus:The history of Argentina seemed to have the structure of a folletín, a novel in episodes, with a plot that unfolds slowly, chapter by chapter, leaving its reader in suspense and, at times, in despair. “One cannot foretell anything.You have to go chapter by chapter. May we one day know the whole story,” they agreed. The choice of the word folletín to describe Argentine history was certainly an interesting one. As a nineteenth-century term, it brings to mind the antiquated custom of the reader who laboriously cut, assembled ,and bound together a narrative from the serialized sections of a favorite newspaper or magazine. Folletín also recalls the very forum in which many of the guiding fictions of the region appeared, such as introduction Interrogating Fashion xiv Introduction the masterpiece by one intellectual who would become an Argentine president, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, first translated into English as Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days ofTyrants, or Civilization and Barbarism.2 Like other guiding fictions from Argentina, this study of the tyrannical practices of the military caudillo appropriated the vocabulary of color and fashion to shed light on the psychology of civil war in the River Plate region following independence from Spain. In this work, crimson, then a legalized color, and the gaucho’s indigenous poncho represented the barbarians whose brute military force pushed open the gates of power and then proceeded to destroy the political opposition. The appearance of European-style clothing, in turn, represented the persecuted and more “civilized” minority who, like Sarmiento, initiated a struggle that was against dictatorship yet for interpretive supremacy.3 In the pages of the guiding fictions, the nineteenth-century reader found the very fragments that spoke to the heart of national constitution—however elusive those goals might have seemed at the time—and proceeded to collect and order them in some logical fashion. Responding to debates already in the realm of popular culture and helping foster patriotic sentiments, these at times contradictory and tension-filled fragments reflected on questions of national identity and worked to unite readers in a kind of consensusbuilding endeavor. Back at the Clásica y Moderna bookstore, a chapter continued to unfold. Expressing their solidarity with the protesters who risked their lives in the streets of Buenos Aires and before the Casa Rosada,4 the authors admitted to feeling torn about producing and attempting to sell their work at a time of crisis.“If someone comes to loot books,” Juan Forn reportedly said,“I will tell them to take one of mine and not one by Isabel Allende.” Carlos Gamerro was deeply concerned:“The problem will be if the reports present a montage of images of the country being torn apart with intercalated ones of a few writers chatting passively in a bookstore. And that would be a complete fabrication. We are not in an ivory tower.” In reference to the authors’ discussion, La Nación would add a subtitle to contextualize these fears. It recalled a Peronist slogan, “Alpargatas sí, libros no” (Yes to espadrilles, no to books), that sought to undermine intellectual pursuits by privileging Introduction xv working-class interests—as evidenced by the espadrilles and overalls flaunted by the masses. In the 1940s and 1950s, during the first wave of Peronism, mobilized workers often sported “bizarre costumes,” writes Daniel James, “in settings other than the workplace or the barrio.” Some identified the gente bien (the well-to-do) by mocking their fashionable clothing and hairstyles.5 Although gathered at the bookstore of choice for intellectuals and many a gente bien, the authors at this media event clearly...