The Craze for Calicoes: Selling Fashion in Spain and America

Abstract

In 1788, New Spain’s Board of Trade warned the Spanish king that a craze for calicoes was sweeping the viceroyalty’s principal cities as well as its countryside. Prohibitions against the sale of foreign goods had failed to stop traveling salesmen from peddling their fancy European wares in faraway villages. The foreign fabrics enticed even the poor and the humble, who gladly went into debt to acquire the same fashionable clothes worn by wealthier Europeans.¹ Those who could not wait for the arrival of the peddlers asked merchants and shopkeepers to procure them the forbidden fabrics. Women were especially enamored of these foreign goods. In 1791 Eusebio Ventura Beleña, oidor (judge) of Mexico’s Audiencia (Royal Court of Appeals) reported to the viceroy that, upon seeing a foreign lady arrive in Veracruz wearing white “dresses from Cologne” and exquisite foreign fabric (lienzos), the local women rushed to buy the same dress. They longed to wear it not just on special occasions, but daily.² This voracious appetite for foreign clothes led to a flood of imported calicoes, which in turn made them cheaper. To the oidor, the trade in textiles in the whole of the Spanish colonies might fall prey to women’s capricho, their fickle whim. “How long will [this] women’s craze [entusiasmo] last?” the oidor asked, to which he responded in despair: “God only knows.”³