Research Project

As part of my Spanish degree, I did a research project on royal women's fashion in 17th century Spain. For reference, these fashions are often depicted in paintings by Diego Velázquez, such as in the famous painting "Las Meninas". The research included historical factors and political motivations for why women wore what they did. For example, the influences that marriage or wars had on their fashion and why that was important. I then looked at the tailor's manuals written in Spain during that period to help understand the construction of these garments since there are very few existing pieces in the style I studied. I decided to use one of these manuals and attempt to make a 1/3 scale version of a saya entera or formal dress. While these manuals were not intended to be used as patterns, I was able to draw several conclusions that left me confident in attempting this. One of the main purposes of these manuals was to show how to cut garments with the least amount of fabric waste. With that in mind, the pieces should drawn on the correct grainline and include seam allowances, and all pieces in a "traza" are of the same scale. This knowledge provided a jumping block for assembling the pattern. However, the manual includes no instructions for how to assemble the garment. Using Martín Andujar's "Geometría y Trazas Pertenecientes al Oficio de Sastres" I tested three "trazas" to help me understand both the construction of garments and how the fashions would affect those who wore them. It was a fascinating process, and there are many new questions I would like to investigate in the future.

My slide show presentation with pictures of the pieces I mocked up and the research paper are linked below, but are currently only available in Spanish.

An abbreviated version of this research was presented at the Shenandoah University Research Expo (SURE), where it won an award for Outstanding Undergraduate Lightning Talk, Individual, Non-Empirical.