(By Marina Sepúlveda) The researcher María Isabel Baldasarre traces in her recent book "Well dressed.A visual history of fashion in Buenos Aires 1870-1914 "A tour of fashion that links the modes of dress and its practices in the city of Buenos Aires with the transformations due to the strong European immigration, social tensions and the look towards Europeas part of a social belonging where "seeing and being seen" adopted great relevance and was mutating to this day.

The fourth title of the Amppersand seal fashion studies collection addresses in its almost 380 pages the ways of living and traveling a city that is transformed by the impulse of modernity and is constituted as a regional reference.

Baldasarre establishes a hilvanado that arose from the images of varied files on an era that defined new class membership relationships by dress modes and where consumption appears as a reflection of a European fashion with imported and local production, while identifying thePassage of a highly encoded clothing to a "normalization" or standardization of styles and uses, as a map of a city that the historical cut of the text addresses through milestones as its transformation in the capital of Argentina, its passage through the centenary1910 and his brake with World War I.

Based on an extensive four -year investigation conducted from periodic publications such as faces and masks, the mosquito, the home column, Fray Mocho, PBT the illustrated childhood for children from 6 to 80 years, the press, the nation and others,o Publicities, catalogs and magazines, photographs, drawings and comic vignettes, the images populate a profuse data in data.

From there, the author outline practices of dress in the thriving Buenos Aires of the Belle Époque from a course of six chapters that move through the geography of fashion consumption, the practices of doing and dressing, culture the culturevisual, the notion of disciplining the body, the whim of fashion and its relationship with the celebrities of the moment.

In dialogue with Télam, Baldasarre, who currently serves as the National Director of Museums, says that in this research he returns on the subject of "cultural consumption" to a historical period already investigated by her from the "market and collecting of art", andIn this way, its aspiration to study clothing, its production, consumption and showcase.

"Those years are central to the constitution of modern Argentina," saysVisual culture that begins to massify and on the other hand coincides with the emergence of department stores and with great professionalization of the fashion business in European capitals ".

"Studying fashion in that period was a pending issue," he explains.And he adds that "many of the canons and prejudices about being well dressed active until now were instituted in those founding decades".

-Telam: What is the relevance of this current reading about the practice of dress?

-Maria Isabel Baldasarre: Many of the uses and presumptions about the appearances that governed much of the twentieth century and even arrived at the present, were constituted in the time that the book addresses, 110 or 150 years ago.For example, how men and women should look.Likewise, a permanent desire is detected at that time to be fashionable and follow the latest trends that always seemed to come from outside, the famous prestige of the imported.In the pages many criticisms also resonate, for example, women entry, texts and texts about which should be an ideal body, both feminine and masculine, about the risks it implied not to exhibit an clothing that corresponded to biological sex.All these issues, which only in the present begin to be questioned, for example from activisms such as the postitive body or transgender people, or from the market from unisex or genderless clothing proposals (without gender), they conditioned much of thecultural practices of the last hundred years, and many of them are still in force.

-T: How is that transformation of dressing to show yourself in public and private space?

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-MB: In the nineteenth century the silhouette, eminently feminine but also masculine, was constituted with a large number of garments, which were highly encoded.Basically the female and masculine suit were a succession of layers of fabrics, and frames, which pointed to an upright and modeling body.It was very little that could be seen from the skin of men and women in public life.The neck, face, hands and eventually some neckline in the female costumes at night.Men's shirt was a garment of underwear and was considered a bad tone exhibiting in "shirt sleeves".The same the female corset, although it was hidden, it was used from an early age and for all the activities of the day and night, even to perform heavy jobs or practice.The beach clothes were also very regulated, the body, the hair covered, to reveal the anatomy little and to avoid burning with the sun.Domestic clothing was also subject to rules, from Batas or Peignours, to sophisticated pajamas with orientalist airs, these already reserved for the wealthy sectors.In summary, underwear was omnipresent as long as it shaped the silhouette, but it was forbidden in public sight.

-T: What does it mean today to be "well dressed"?

-MB: I think that today the idea of dressing is more lax and there is a large claim of personal styles and the free combination of garments.However, in certain areas, business, protocol, sports, great coding persists on what is correct or not to use, what parts of the body should or not be displayed.The condemnation of the bodies that escape from the norm, not only the fat bodies, but also those racialized or those that for some physical or aesthetic reason do not enter into the supposed "normality" is still in force, and that is why we also find a greatquestioning, for example, from various body activisms, feminisms and different LGTBIQ+ movements.

-T: What happens to this "normalization" and the need for class to differentiate from clothing?

-MB: If something emerges from the book is that there was no specifically Argentine or Buenos Aires fashion, perhaps its own ways to use fashion, which was then sanctioned by the big capitals, fundamentally Paris and London.The approval effect that they achieved who consumed these garments in distant places such as Buenos Aires is impressive, sometimes even a few weeks after they were installed as a trend in the big capitals.What was proper are the local conditions in which these consumptions were given.This is a moment of great wealth and urban transformation, which makes shops, products and professionals reach mass scale and that Buenos Aires becomes a center of style also at the regional level.On the other hand, Buenos Aires was a society with great social mobility, where its middle layers were being constituted to the rhythm of immigration, industrialization and new labor opportunities.If in Europe the nineteenth century is considered the era of democratization of clothing, in countries such as Argentina that democratization of dress is given in parallel to its consolidation as a modern state.

-T: In the book you think that despite being a period in which the canons are constituted there are some possible escapes to that coercive stiffness on the different bodies What are the resonances of the past?

-MB: Precisely, that normalization that appears, all the time, stated, from medical discourse, police and hygienism but also from the press, has to do with the finding that this model of so strict sex-genic differentiation ismore and more porous.A kind of "Ladran Sancho", which accounts for social anxiety in the face of a redefinition of traditional roles.More and more women who want to dress comfortable and less rigid, who aspire to have greater mobility and therefore freedom in public space, some dare to wear pants, although timidly and to perform some activities, certain characters are missed, thaneither for theatrical purposes or also as a life option, which is dangerous as the new elections in dress seem to enable the claim of other rights.There is an interesting breeding ground, which allows us to raise many links with the present, but also shows us that the nineteenth century was not as crowded or rigid as it seems to the naked eye.

-T: How can you read this perspective posed by the book from feminisms?

-MB: The whole book is crossed by feminist readings that were, in some way, permeating my approach to the past, in addition to the social situation so specific that Argentina crossed in the last decade.The look from feminisms is a "well -dressed" spine, which thinks fashionable not only as an imposition, but tries to recover the importance of pleasure, fantasy, knowledge of sewing and being able to build an appearance.Without denying the power of appearances as mandates of patriarchal culture, I am interested.

With Télam information