Couture and Consensus: Fashion and Politics in Postcolonial Argentina

4. Fashion Writing

95 four Fashion Writing C lothing has functions so apparent that they become easily dismissed, trivialized, or forgotten. But the same coat that keeps out the elements can also distinguish one’s social class and political affinities. In postcolonial Argentina, several influential writers used the apparent triviality of fashion, or what seemed to be innocuous descriptions of clothing and fashion, to import revolutionary ideals. Going far beyond the reporting of innovations in the fashion industry and the detailing of new articles of clothing, these writers imbued everything from pantaloons to petticoats with radical significance in the spectacle of an emerging public sphere. Icons of Federalist power so permeated the etiquette of daily living that simple gestures, such as the type of fan, vest, or dinner plates used, served as indicators of partisanship, indifference, or rebellious animosity .Women’s gloves that revealed crimson-hued portraits of Rosas, for instance, allowed a lady to direct an admirer to kiss her extended hand and the Confederate leader’s face. Some men positioned political allegories inside their top hats so that, when bowing to make a formal greeting, they might display the underside of their hats and their thoughts on government. In an effort to procure order in a period of civil strife, the Rosas regime implemented a series of dress and conduct codes vested with compromising ideological postures. Previous chapters analyze various pledges of allegiance to the Federation, exploring how popular narratives helped legalize Federalist customs and 96 Fashion Writing prioritize the power of uniform. Because this canonization of taste occurred alongside the rise of feelings of nationhood,many intellectuals stressed the importance of assigning customs a pivotal role in the development of an Argentine republic. With great ease, the writers and statesmen of the Rosas period linked the creation of uniquely Argentine customs to the goals and ideals of an emerging republic.Although some argued that the collective regulation of cultural identity would ensure national stability and industrial progress,others maintained that the development of customs would elevate and renovate the character of the nation. Some even discussed the necessity of creating a fashionable order comprised of young intellectual males.The virtuous dress of this elite, argued the editors of El Mártir o Libre (The Martyr or the Free Man), would serve all Argentines as an archetype of moral fortitude and righteousness. Narratives on customs and the morality of dress were to play an important role in the configuration of a national subject. At the same time, the rhetoric of fashion served as a means to defy censors and challenge the traditional and tyrannical practices of the period. Because government censors often thwarted open political discussion, fashion emerged as a metaphor for political change and renovation.This chapter demonstrates how intellectuals of the opposition depended on a protocol of unveiling to introduce topics that, presented in any other forum, would have been censored. Using the concept of fashion writing as a guiding thread,we explore how fashion writing served as a viable means of political protest.La Moda (Fashion) of Buenos Aires disguised its ideological leanings and patterns for national reform in the descriptions of appearance and dress. El Iniciador (The Initiator), a magazine published in Montevideo, carried on this tradition when La Moda was closed down.To press their status as citizens and push for education reform immediately following the fall of Rosas and into the late nineteenth century, women writers co-opted the vocabulary of fashion previously used by their male predecessors. The female editors of La Camelia (The Camellia), for instance, embarked on an ambitious path to restructure and democratize society of the post-Rosas period, resorting to fashion description to make some of their most vital points. In The Empire of Fashion, Gilles Lipovetsky pursues the evolution Fashion Writing 97 of modern democracy through the history of dress. He traces the rise of nationalist sentiments to the creation of national forms of dress in Europe of the Middle Ages. Fashion, he argues, reinforced the “awareness ” of one’s individual and collective identity. He writes,“As a collective constraint, fashion actually left individuals with relative autonomy in matters of appearance; it instituted an unprecedented relation between individuals and the rule of society.”1 Although emerging customs seemed to grant sovereignty to the individual, they also required that the citizen relate him or herself to society at large.Lipovetsky thus argues that this shift in responsibility to...