Moda de la Belle Epoque e indumentaria en la obra de Emilia Pardo Bazán

Abstract

Emilia Pardo Bazán was a deep connoisseur of the world of fashion and its ins and outs. The author showed off her enormous scholarly fashion erudition throughout her short stories and novels, as well as in her articles, essays and even in her particular correspondence. Doña Emilia knows the Fashion system and exhibits her knowledge about the industrial, artisanal, economic and commercial (even customs) fabric of the fashion world in her stories and in her private correspondence. Pardo Bazán lists the great couturier of the moment and meticulously describes her style and contributions to the history of fashion. The interest in fashion is used by the Countess as a narrative resource to characterize the psychology of her female characters, many of which would not be so complex or interesting if Pardo Bazán did not tell us about her dresses or her obsession with rags. Fashion, moreover, allows us to contextualize their stories and novels and if we did not know the dates on which they were written, it would be possible to infer the year based on the trends that are reflected in them. Within literary Realism, fashion was used by Galdós, Valera or Alas Clarín as an instrument in the service of storytelling but probably no one like Pardo Bazán has been able to see among the folds, bows, dressings and fashion repertoires of his characters and the women surrounding it a fascinating female universe full of double meanings. Doña Emilia lives fashion and so we can check in the missives to her friend Carmen Miranda de Pedrosa but, in addition, Doña Emilia thinks fashion. His aesthetic considerations about dress and fashion are paragononly in the thinking of symbolists such as Baudelaire or D'Aurevilly and in the reflections of Balzac's Treaty on Elegant Life. The Galician author's narrative and theatrical work allows us to admire her enormous, vast and surprising wisdom about matter.