On Thursday, April 8, Pilar Iglesias and Hortensia Moreno got up at seven in the morning to have time to put on their lagarterana dress, a magnificent set made up of endless pieces, and be ready for the ten o'clock photo shoot. in the cloister of the church of El Salvador, because those from the magazine came; Just as the Welsh photographer Charles Clifford came in 1858 accompanied by the Duke of Frías, who told him that in his life he was going to see the same thing; and that in 1912 Joaquín Sorolla came to paint them, and to photograph them just a century ago José Ortiz Echagüe and just a year ago the Peruvian Mario Testino, and always, they or their mothers or grandmothers or great-grandmothers, the women and also the men of the town from Lagartera (Toledo), they have taken the time to put on their atavistic clothes, inherited from generation to generation,to pose with everything in its exact place — the shirt, the petticoat, the belt, the kerchief, the skirt, the stockings, the toe, the apron, the choker, the ruff, and what do I know — before his astonished gaze.
Pilar Iglesias, 74, was helped to dress by her two sisters, and as they put parts on her, she reminded them so much of Grandma Quisca that they had tears falling, and she told them not to cry, that they had to be happy. Hortensia Moreno (56) was helped by her sister-in-law and a neighbor. Moreno felt the usual: as if her grandmother María got inside her and possessed her. María wore Lagarterana all her life. She died in 1982. One day she said: "Today I don't feel like sewing," and two days later she died. The last Lagarterana who wore Lagarterana every day was Aunt Felipa, who died in 2011. Her death closed a gradual process of loss of the daily use of these clothes that began with the Civil War, when, according to local legend, the Soldiers, ignorant of the wonder before them,they pitored at women and made them ashamed of their looks.
Hortensia Moreno, dressed as a bride with a bullfighter known as a doublet - this one, made of terry: a carved silk velvet -, in Lagartera (Toledo) .Yago Castromil / EPS
Until then, everyone in Lagartera, they formidable and they with their most sober clothes, about 2,500 at that time, 1,000 more than today, dressed as they had dressed there for centuries, with a unique singularity that an authority of good taste defines as "the manufacturing carried out to the maximum of excellence, in an unsurpassed harmony of patterns and chromatic information ”. This authority is Tomás Alía, 57, a renowned interior designer, born in Lagartera and son of the farm teacher Pepita Alía, who at 90 has passed the relief of the cause to Tomás after decades promoting the heritage of his town, to such a level that in the Vatican he came to kiss the ring of the Fisherman of Paul VI dressed as a Lagarteran bride,and that Queen Juliana of the Netherlands had the guard trained in the garden of her palace so that Pepita would enter with honors with the tablecloths she had embroidered for her.
Tomás Alía is a professional with a saturated project schedule - luxury hotels, single-family homes, offices - but perhaps what occupies the most space in his dizzying head - he thinks very fast and speaks even faster than he thinks - is what qualifies as the "great stone" of his mother, the obsession to safeguard the rich legacy of his people. His purpose is for these clothes to be declared intangible heritage of humanity by Unesco - as happened in 2019 with the ceramics of Talavera, of which he is an ambassador - and that this facilitates their protection and opens the eyes to the current potential of his ancient techniques. of elaboration.Alía's biggest dream is that a university of decorative arts is founded in Spain in which students can learn from the artisanal knowledge that is hardly preserved throughout the country and modernize it. He considers it a strategic necessity: “You have to define well what the famous Spain Brand is. The Spain Brand is not the paella, nor the chotis, nor the Sanfermines, please, but the best of our craftsmanship, the handmade, which is true luxury, well understood luxury, and even more so in this globalized world that demands originality and sustainability ”. Alía regrets that there is no State project in this regard and points out that now would be the ideal time to undertake it, because the European Commission has just launched the New European Bauhaus, an innovation plan that connects green economy and style.He considers it a strategic necessity: “You have to define well what the famous Spain Brand is. The Spain Brand is not the paella, nor the chotis, nor the Sanfermines, please, but the best of our craftsmanship, the handmade, which is true luxury, well understood luxury, and even more so in this globalized world that demands originality and sustainability ”. Alía regrets that there is no State project in this regard and points out that now would be the ideal time to undertake it, because the European Commission has just launched the New European Bauhaus, an innovation plan that connects green economy and style.He considers it a strategic necessity: “You have to define well what the famous Spain Brand is. The Spain Brand is not the paella, nor the chotis, nor the Sanfermines, please, but the best of our craftsmanship, the handmade, which is true luxury, well understood luxury, and even more so in this globalized world that demands originality and sustainability ”. Alía regrets that there is no State project in this regard and points out that now would be the ideal time to undertake it, because the European Commission has just launched the New European Bauhaus, an innovation plan that connects green economy and style.and even more so in this globalized world that demands originality and sustainability ”. Alía regrets that there is no State project in this regard and points out that now would be the ideal time to undertake it, because the European Commission has just launched the New European Bauhaus, an innovation plan that connects green economy and style.and even more so in this globalized world that demands originality and sustainability ”. Alía regrets that there is no State project in this regard and points out that now would be the ideal time to undertake it, because the European Commission has just launched the New European Bauhaus, an innovation plan that connects green economy and style.
Wrapped up in a modern jacket whose back reads “There is no planet B”, the designer passes in a tris from speech to delight, inclines his head towards Pilar Iglesias's chest with meticulous eyes and carefully caressing her ruff, he exclaims: “¡¡ Daughter, is that what you wear here is the greatest! The weaves! ”. The ruff is like a bib that is almost open in the front and the weaving is a type of knit that consists of carving a fabric to make a rectilinear drawing with enhancement. Alía adds: “Be careful about carving. Lagarteranas are not embroiderers, they are peasants. The common and common embroiderer follows a drawing made in pencil, which is very easy, while what the tiller does is work on the weft and warp of a fabric, as if plowing the earth, and create reliefs following memory patterns .They form topographies mathematically ”.
Detail of Lagarteran jewelry on a ruff with spiral figures, typical of Sephardic semiotics, called ceazos. Yago Castromil / EPS
Pilar Iglesias is amazed that her ancestors, who couldn't go to school, were such good geometers. “My grandmother went to Barcelona to sell table linen without knowing how to read or write. She was dressed as a lagarterana and when she got lost she would ask: 'Excuse me, where am I?', And they would say to her [stately tone]: 'Are you on the Paseo de Gracia', or: 'Excuse me, where am I?', And [ stately tone]: 'You are on the Rambla de Catalunya ”. The Lagarteranas began to commercialize their work at the beginning of the 20th century, applying their virtuosity to home clothes such as tablecloths, bedding or towels. Today there are still embroidery businesses in town and most women know how to style, although few master the more complex and distinctive techniques, the mastery of which requires a monastic amount of time, patience and concentration. Hortensia Moreno says,for example, that her daughters sew well, “because they carry it in their blood”, but they cannot be expected to experience it like her, who without going any further has been making a quilt for 10 years. Ten years. A quilt. But, boy, what is 10 years for a woman who greeted us in century-old red worsted stockings stained with cochineal and a ruff of
ceazos
of more than two centuries ago.
The
ceazo -
Lagartera has its own dictionary - is a spiral figure typical of their costumes and which, according to Alía, belongs to Sephardic semiotics.
The origin of the peculiar Lagarteran culture and its clothes is still an open question. The late local historian Julián García Sánchez wrote that the town could be founded in medieval Mozarabic exiles from Andalusia due to Muslim pressure and that, in defense of their Catholic faith, they locked themselves “in a hostile circle of indigenous people”. What Tomás Alía maintains, on the contrary, is that Lagartera must have been founded at that time from an original neighborhood called Toledillo, made up of Jews from Toledo, and that what has survived until now, half a millennium after the forced conversions and the edict of expulsion of the Catholic Monarchs, which we saw in the spectacular outfits of Hortensia, Pilar and the dozen older and younger neighbors who gathered in the church,And also in the pride with which they wore them, from those in their seventies to their twenties, it is the residue of the Sephardic essence. “What is in this town is not folklore. This is an open book on anthropology. It is the result of a culture determined to defend and preserve its patrons, even though the religious origin has been completely erased ”, Alía affirms with conviction.
Detail of a flush shirt from a red suit from Lagartera.
Yago Castromil / EPS
The designer makes a list of the main indications that would support his hypothesis and begins with the ruffs of the women of the
mellah
(Jewish quarters) of northern Morocco, with the same
ceazos,
symbols of infinity, of the
Lagarteran ruffs
.
He speaks of the hanging beds that used to exist in some homes in the town, and of those that keep one in his house in Lagartera, which were used only for weddings, profusely adorned and covered by a canopy, and which is linked to the
chuppah,
the Jewish wedding canopy. He also mentions the cantarera, a common niche in Lagarteran homes that could have to do with the spaces where the torah would have been placed in the past. And at his home, Pepita Alía's home, he displays the extreme variegation of Catholic religious imagery; He says that it was an accentuated feature of the rooms of the Lagartera families since ancient times and deduces that perhaps it responded to the overacting of the convert.
Concha Herranz, curator of the Museo del Traje, agrees that the circular figures on the ruffles are a sign of Jewish identity and considers it evident that those on the clothes of Lagarterana may have that root, regardless of the fact that the costume has, as in all traditional Spanish costumes, variety of influences. "They are the fruit of our history," he says, "and ours is a history of hodgepodgements."
The truth is that, whether or not it is a masterful crypto-Jewish heritage, the clothing of Lagartera, an icon of Spanish culture, has arrived until today in a formidable state of conservation, and this has been possible due to the unusual zeal that this community has put into the care of their heritage, in which the Lagarteranos of the XXI century also participate. Only an English test prevented Dori Ropero's 13-year-old daughter from getting dressed and going to the photo session, in which there were two twenty-somethings, Natalia Marín and Estela Corrochán, listening to the explanations of Alía and the ladies without saying a word. pío, or the thirty-year-old Alfonso Fernández, who by order of Don Tomás had to shave a 10-year-old beard to be as he should be.
Alfonso Fernández, in a party dress, and Dori Ropero, with a fine cloth toe warmer and a nail-colored apron.Yago Castromil / EPS
He did it without much problem, because Alfonso Fernández, a man with a sweet and serene tone, loves to dress as a Lagarterano. He wore the classic elements of men's clothing: jacket, nightgown, gown, girdle, breeches, leggings, hat, all gathered by him, since the fact is that he was born in a humble house and his family had hardly any pieces. Next to his lived a peasant woman, Emiliana, and as a child he passed by there every day and was enchanted looking from the door at the colors of those clothes, the glitter of sequins. With time, he would come in and spend hours watching her work, and Mrs. Emiliana was explaining the why of everything, the keys to this ancient and enigmatic plot of words and threads. At the age of 12, his passion was so great that he spent the inheritance left by a grandmother, 600 euros,in a 19th century Lagarterano groom's nightgown. He keeps it like a treasure, wrapped in cotton cloths.