Permanencias estructurales rurales versus mudanzas. Consumos, necesidades y apariencias en Valladolid a finales del Antiguo Régimen

Dowries trousseau and inventories of clothes prove a slow evolution of the popular Castile’s clothes, in a differentiating aesthetic civilizational struggle. Although that process was not static, the victory of modern habits cornered traditional uses (apparent changes or needs, cute versus rustic) when they prevailed in the clash between urban and rural cultural areas. Changes in fashions were not exclusive to the courtly world. However, the concept ‘vulgar’ each time was less associated with the maintenance of the imperishable, and more with the traditional and archaic and with the brake of all new clothing and mentality. When we investigate the rural daily lifestyle at the end of the Ancient Regime, we stress on its cultural resistances, giving priority to the immutable community weight (regional clothing), on a minority rural innovative spirit (from the perspective of hierarchies and conflicts of appearance) and on the external duality of rusticity– authenticity as aesthetic models linked to local backwardness at struggle with a cosmopolitan modernization.