Luxury, Clothing and Race in Colonial Spanish America

Abstract

It may be said without exaggeration, that the finest stuffs made in countries, where industry is always inventing something new, are more generally seen in Lima than in any other place; vanity and ostentation not being restrained by custom or law.1 With this grand overstatement the Spanish travellers Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa summed up their account of fashion in 1740s Lima. Dress in the capital of colonial Peru, according to these men, differed from that of Europe only in its extravagance. European goods and clothing, they insisted, were widely available, which allowed the ladies of Lima to indulge their immoderate taste for Flemish lace and pearls, to the ruination of their husbands. Such was these women’s passion for finery that they often succumbed to uterine cancer, brought on, the travellers were certain, by ‘their excessive use of perfumes’.2 Moreover, mid-eighteenth-century Lima was, in the eyes of Juan and Ulloa, a city of sartorial democracy: Nor is the distinction between the several classes very great, for the use of all sorts of cloth being allowed, everyone wears what he can purchase. So that it is not uncommon to see a mulatto, or any other mechanic, dressed in a tissue equal to anything that can be worn by a more opulent person, they all greatly affect fine clothes.3

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