Refashioning Spain: Fashion, Consumer Culture, Gender, and International Integration Under the Late Franco Dictatorship

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2017

Department

History

School

Humanities

Abstract

Writing in a 1971 issue of Cortty, the El Corte Inglés department store’s employee bulletin, journalist Vicente Verdú marveled at how changes in Spain’s consumer culture had transformed Spanish gender relations during the 1960s. The repressive early years of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s brutal dictatorship (1939-1975), had seen the Franco regime and its ally, the Spanish Catholic Church, impose a rigid gender hierarchy that mandated separation of the sexes in public areas from the age of 6, disenfranchised and stripped women of the right to work, and stressed female obedience to male authority. But by the late 1960s, Verdú wrote, new “youth” sections at Spain’s department stores had undermined this gender order. These departments traded especially in unisex fashions influenced by counter-cultural movements then sweeping through the United States and Western Europe; by offering boys and girls the same clothes in the same place, they became spaces where Spanish adolescents could mingle freely over clothes that emphasized equality, not gender difference. More radically, the messaging that surrounded these foreign-inspired fashions also frequently celebrated an iconoclastic youthful idealism, suggesting - sometimes explicitly - that adolescents now knew better than their benighted Francoist elders, and could legitimately rebel against the sociopolitical stagnation they represented. The change, Verdú underscored, was dramatic - “from zero to one thousand”. 1.

Publication Title

The Global 1960s: Convention, Contest and Counterculture

First Page

159

Last Page

175

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