Unraveling 19th-Century Spanish Fashion: The Romanticism Museum's Online Course

This online course delves into 19th-century Spanish fashion as a visual language of emotion, identity, and politics. Participants will explore how garments like mantillas, capes, and levitas symbolized Romantic sensibilities and contributed to the construction of Spanish national identity during a period of significant social change.

This online course, 'Entre mantillas y levitas: la moda en el Romanticismo,' offers an in-depth exploration of 19th-century Spanish fashion, viewing clothing as a powerful visual language charged with emotion, identity, and political discourse. The program highlights how, in a Spain navigating the conflict between tradition and modernity, attire became a stage for representing ideas of nationhood, gender, class, and liberty. Through an analysis of portraits, illustrated press, fashion plates, literature, and paintings, the course will examine iconic elements such as mantillas, capes, levitas, and combs, not merely as adornments but as symbols of a Romantic sensibility that celebrated the local, the exotic, and the individual. The course will illustrate the coexistence of French-inspired elegance with the assertion of popular traditions, the idealization of the Romantic woman between virtue and seduction, and the transformation of male attire into an emblem of bourgeois modernity. It will also address how fashion played a role in the invention of a national identity during a time of revolutions, exiles, and profound social shifts, asserting that fashion was indeed one of the principal narrators of Spanish Romanticism. The course is taught by Ana Velasco Molpeceres, a distinguished professor, writer, and researcher specializing in fashion and social history.

The course fee is 60 euros for the general public and 50 euros for members of the 'Amigos del Museo'. Registration opens on April 1st. To enroll, payment should be made to the Asociación de Amigos del Museo Romántico, and proof of transfer, along with full name, ID, and fiscal address, must be sent via email to [email protected]. Members should indicate their status in the email.