Amanda Wunder. Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez: A Tailor at the Court of Philip IV

The jewel of the Museo del Prado—and without a doubt one of the most famous works in the history of art—is Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). As is well known, the monumental painting is not only a work of technical brilliance, but also a manifesto on the nature of art and the status of the artist. But the creative talent behind one of the most instantly recognizable elements of the painting—the exaggerated, bell-like silhouettes of the gowns worn by the ladies-in-waiting and the infanta at its heart—has been relegated to obscurity until now. His name is Mateo Aguado and his life and career are the subject of Amanda Wunder’s brilliant new book.Aguado won the position of sastre de cámara de la reina, or official tailor, first to Queen Isabel of Bourbon (from 1630), and later to Queen Mariana of Austria (from 1649). It was a prestigious if often grueling, fraught, and under-paid position at Philip IV’s court. Aguado’s career ran parallel to that of Velázquez, and indeed, as Wunder demonstrates, both men faced similar challenges in their work, particularly in the struggle to gain respect for the intellectual side of their craft (18–20). Wunder’s book is not only the first biographical study of Aguado, but, crucially, constitutes the first full-length study of a premodern tailor. Though tailors and tailoring in early modern Europe in general and in Spain in particular have been studied before—primarily from the perspective of social history—Wunder’s book is the first to offer a full picture of the challenges, conditions, and impact of an individual tailor’s work.In this beautifully designed and richly illustrated work, Wunder demonstrates mastery over an impressive range of archival, visual, material, literary, and historical sources to reconstruct the trajectory of Aguado’s court career from its beginnings in the 1630s until his death in 1672. Her command of the previously unpublished material offers a model for how meticulous archival research can reconstruct a much broader history when skillfully interwoven with other types of evidence and analysis. Particularly clever is her ability to fill in the gaps in Aguado’s biography with well-reasoned, research-based speculation as well as her expert harnessing of visual sources—particularly, portrait painting—to analyze fashion trends at court during periods for which documentary evidence is scant.The book is divided into seven chapters throughout which Wunder contextualizes Aguado’s career within the environment of the seventeenth-century Spanish Habsburg court, the shifting fortunes of the queens whom Aguado served, and the many seismic contemporary political and world events that took place during Philip IV’s tumultuous reign. In chapter one, “A Tailor in Training,” Wunder introduces the reader to Aguado’s early life and provides a useful overview of the general condition of the cloth trades and the practice of tailoring in seventeenth-century Madrid. Chapter 2, “The Queen’s Tailor,” covers the first decade of Aguado’s career as official tailor to the queen by drawing on the nearly complete records and accounts from this period, most published by Wunder for the first time. The chapter is full of careful detail about the process of tailoring that will interest the most curious of readers, but the details are never gratuitous. Wunder also establishes the collaborative relationship between the queen as patroness and Aguado as tailor and the richly symbolic weight of queenly costume, demonstrating the agency and soft power that was often wielded by consorts. In chapter three, “Other Responsibilities,” she discusses the additional duties Aguado held as the queen’s official tailor: namely, dressing the royal children and constructing clothing intended to be offered as gifts at court. The evidence presented will be of great appeal to a wide range of historians; Wunder reveals not only information about Aguado’s specific career trajectory, but also about how clothing could function in the courtly gift economy wherein garments circulated as diplomatic and devotional gifts.Chapter 4, “Interlude in Black,” provides a transition, discussing the queen’s evolving wardrobe as she took on the role of regent during her husband’s long campaign absences from Madrid. Wunder also highlights how Queen Isabel strategically used fashion—in this case, the sobriety of black dress—to convey authority. As Wunder demonstrates, Isabel’s death in 1644 was financially devastating for Aguado and led to the introduction of additional sumptuary reforms at court that would not be lifted for several years. In chapter five, “Aguado’s Second Act,” Wunder explores the arrival of the impossibly young new consort Mariana of Austria to Madrid, resulting in what she deems the most creative decade of Aguado’s career (135). This is when several factors—including the patronage of the queen, who favored very feminine, colorful styles, the return of theater after a temporary ban, and the arrival of foreign tastemakers to court—contributed to noteworthy novelties in dress, including the triumph of the infamous guardinfantes farthingale featured in Las Meninas.In chapter six, “Royal Matchmaking,” Wunder explores the dress patronage of the two infantas (María Teresa and Margarita) amid the shifting political climate in the 1650s in the context of a court at which the line of succession was continually imperiled. Those interested in political and diplomatic history will be especially eager to read about María Teresa’s wardrobe at the time of her marriage to the future Louis XIV of France and the transformative power of dress in the realm of diplomacy. In her final chapter, “Paterfamilias,” Wunder follows the declining fortunes of Aguado from the 1660s on, which included a stint in jail for violating court etiquette, mounting debts, personal crises, and the death of the king in 1665.Wunder concludes by returning to the menina silhouette immortalized by Velázquez—today, a national Spanish symbol of sorts—and thereby reiterates the clear goal of her book: to “restore credit” (207) to Aguado as a designer of the enduring visual fabric of seventeenth-century Madrid. There can be no doubt she accomplishes this goal thoroughly and with aplomb in the preceding pages. And yet this is perhaps where the only true criticism of the book can be found. Her argument might have been further solidified had Mateo Aguado’s name been memorialized in the book’s title, or even subtitle, instead of the more general one with its reference to Velázquez that appears in the Yale edition as well as the edition simultaneously released in Spanish (La moda española en la época de Velázquez: Un sastre en la corte de Felipe IV, Ediciones El Viso, 2023). It is Aguado’s story, after all. But this omission is likely a question of strategic publicity and perhaps lay outside of the author’s control.Wunder’s book is not only a pleasure to read, but with its useful paratextual elements—a comprehensive glossary, a concise chronology of dress, and myriad charts, tables, and illustrations—will remain an important reference for any scholar of Spanish history, art, and literature for years to come.