Introduction

In July of 1639, a remarkable sight greeted the multitude who passed through the bustling little plaza fronting the Cárcel de Corte (Court Jail), just steps away from the Plaza Mayor, in the heart of Madrid: women’s hoopskirts were dangling from the balconies of the jail’s dignified redbrick façade.Footnote ¹ In April of that year, King Philip IV (b. 1605; r. 1621–65) had issued a proclamation banning the wide hoopskirt that was known as the guardainfante. The garment first had appeared in the Spanish capital about five years earlier and caused a great deal of scandal and disruption, with critics of the fashion claiming that women were using the guardainfante to hide illicit pregnancies.Footnote ² The 1639 ban outlawed the guardainfante for all women except for prostitutes in an effort to discredit the fashionable garment.Footnote ³ That summer, according to the noble court chronicler José Pellicer de Tovar’s news notice for 26 July, Madrid’s residents were amused “to see more than a hundred guardainfantes that have been taken from women and hung in shame on the balconies of the Court Jail.”Footnote ⁴ But the crackdown on the guardainfante proved to be short lived. Instead of enforcing its own law, the Crown promoted and encouraged the fashion, which was worn by the king’s own wives and daughters. In the decades following the ban, the guardainfante only grew larger in size and popularity. An anonymous View of the Court Jail (ca. 1670) is a testament to the ineffectiveness of the law: women wearing extremely wide hoopskirts promenade past the jail upon which guardainfantes once had hung (fig. 1). During the decades that it remained in fashion, from the 1630s to the 1670s, the guardainfante took up an enormous amount of space, literally and figuratively, in the Spanish capital and in far-flung cities from Genoa to Mexico City. From the guardainfantes that dangled ignominiously from the balconies of the Court Jail to the portraits of royal women that hung exalted in halls of state, this controversial fashion was at the center of politics in the Spanish empire for much of the seventeenth century.

Figure 1. Anonymous (Spanish). The Court Jail, ca. 1670 (detail). Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Madrid. The Bridgeman Art Library.

It is impossible to know exactly what the guardainfante looked like — much less what it felt like to wear one — since none are known to have survived the centuries.Footnote ⁵ Despite the lack of material evidence, textual sources reveal some details about the guardainfante’s construction, while paintings demonstrate the evolving shape of the garment.Footnote ⁶ A guardainfante was a free-hanging structure (that is, it was not sewn into a skirt) that tied around the waist to extend the hip.Footnote ⁷ Hoops attached to each other by straps hung from the waist down to the ground; the hoops gave the skirts worn over them a stiff appearance and created a large cavity beneath the cage-like structure. This armature could be made out of any number of rigid materials, including whalebone, iron, wicker, or wood.Footnote ⁸ The playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca used the hardware of the guardainfante to comic effect in his play Guárdate de la agua mansa (Beware of still waters, 1649), in which an unsophisticated suitor mistakes his beloved’s guardainfante for a ladder “with lots of iron steps, and many knots to fasten it, and wires and hooks.”Footnote ⁹ Layers of petticoats worn underneath the guardainfante protected a woman’s body from the hoopskirt’s harsh materials. Multiple layers of overskirts covered the guardainfante, and women used stuffing in their garments to create a rounder, softer silhouette.Footnote ¹⁰

The English word farthingale is an umbrella term that can be used to describe any of the hoopskirts that were popular in early modern Spain.Footnote ¹¹ Queen Isabella of Bourbon (b. 1602; r. 1621–44) — born Princess Elizabeth of France — wore many different kinds of farthingales over the course of her life, and her portraits illustrate the progression of styles that led to the invention of the guardainfante.Footnote ¹² As a young princess in France, she dressed in the style popular at the court of Marie de’ Medici with a wheel-shaped farthingale that tied around the waist to extend the hip, as seen in a 1611 portrait by Frans Pourbus the Younger (fig. 2).Footnote ¹³ The skirts covering the French farthingale were pleated and gathered at the top and fell softly to the ground. After her 1615 marriage to Prince Philip of Spain, Isabella of Bourbon adopted the traditional Spanish farthingale known as the verdugado (fig. 3). In contrast to the French farthingale, which created a drum shape, the verdugado looked like a cone with a narrow waist and wide base, thanks to a series of circular hoops of increasing size that were sewn into the skirt. The hoops gave the overskirt the appearance of a stiff, smooth surface.

Figure 2. The French wheel farthingale, as worn by the future Queen Isabella of Bourbon. Frans Pourbus the Younger. Princess Elizabeth of France, 1611. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. The Bridgeman Art Library.

Figure 3. The Spanish verdugado, as worn by Queen Isabella of Bourbon, first wife of Philip IV. Anonymous (Spanish). Queen Isabella of Bourbon, 1621. Musée Fesch, Ajaccio, Corsica. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

The verdugado first had appeared at the Spanish court in the 1470s, and it remained popular in Spain well into the seventeenth century, long after women in Paris and London abandoned their wheel-shaped farthingales. In the mid-1630s in Spain, the verdugado began to evolve into a new kind of hoopskirt that combined the hip-extending framework of the French farthingale with the hoops of the Spanish verdugado. This was the guardainfante. A rarely seen portrait in the collection of the Prado Museum depicts Queen Isabella of Bourbon in ca. 1641–42 wearing an early version of the guardainfante (fig. 4).Footnote ¹⁴ According to costume historian Carmen Bernis, “what Spanish women did was to convert the French farthingale into something much more complicated and uncomfortable, incorporating typically Spanish elements like the hoops.”Footnote ¹⁵ The earliest guardainfantes closely resembled the verdugado, with a slightly expanded and more rounded hip subtly altering its conical shape. Indeed, the differences are so subtle that it is very difficult to discern the distinction between a verdugado and a guardainfante in portraits depicting Isabella of Bourbon between the late 1630s and 1644, the year of her premature death.

Figure 4. An early example of a guardainfante. Anonymous (Spanish). Queen Isabella of Bourbon, ca. 1641–42. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The differences between traditional verdugados and the first guardainfantes might appear minor today, but in the 1630s the change in style inspired an outpouring of vitriolic criticism that stemmed in part from its association with French fashion. The jurist Alonso Carranza published an extended screed against the guardainfante in 1636, in which he claimed that the word “guardainfante” (which roughly translates to “baby keeper”) derived from the French and referred to upper-class French women’s common practice of using their farthingales to hide illicit pregnancies.Footnote ¹⁶ It was typical for seventeenth-century Spanish critics to describe the guardainfante as a French invasion, although in reality it was a Spanish invention that never was worn in France.Footnote ¹⁷

The guardainfante has been mocked and reviled by critics both Spanish and foreign ever since its invention in the 1630s up until the present day. In the seventeenth century, critics denounced the guardainfante as a scandalous and indecent garment that ruined the reputations of women who wore it and corrupted society at large. Golden Age fiction writers used the guardainfante for sight gags (women stuck in doorframes) and as the inspiration for devious plots (women hiding guilty secrets beneath their skirts) in countless short stories, skits, plays, and poems.Footnote ¹⁸ To early modern English and French observers of the style, the “monstrous” guardainfante was a Spanish peculiarity that shored up stereotypes of Spain as a retrograde and very foreign country.Footnote ¹⁹

The guardainfante’s negative reputation proved remarkably durable over the centuries. Some 300 years after the style had reached its height, the Spanish historian José Deleito y Piñuela called the guardainfante a “ridiculous and pernicious fashion,” while French historian Marcelin Defourneaux described the farthingale’s silhouette as “grotesque.”Footnote ²⁰ While the language used to describe the guardainfante has become less inflammatory in recent decades (in a 1999 exhibition catalogue, Jonathan Brown evenhandedly defined the “ample guardainfante” as being “a spectacular costume which was in fashion at the Spanish court during the 1630s to the 1660s”Footnote ²¹ ), many scholars today continue to repeat unquestioningly the seventeenth-century charge that women used their guardainfantes to hide shameful pregnancies.Footnote ²² While early modern critics of the Spanish farthingale feared that women were using it to subvert male authority, scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been more likely to see it as a misogynistic tool that men used to confine women’s bodies and control their sexuality. In the grand narrative of costume history, the guardainfante typically is characterized as a repressive garment, like the corset, that women cast off with the so-called democratization of fashion in the twentieth century.Footnote ²³

Conventional accounts of the guardainfante have relied upon a small, well-known group of sources produced by male elites at the court: moralizing polemics, sumptuary laws, royal portraits, and literary fiction (including theatrical works). Such sources reveal very little about women’s actual experiences with the guardainfante; indeed, they do not even prove that women really wore the fashion except when sitting for portraits or performing on the stage. But a more diverse body of evidence does exist that makes it possible to investigate the guardainfante beyond the realm of image and representation. Other controversial Baroque fashions were inherently ephemeral and thus left behind little evidence of their existence; such is the case with tapadas (women covering their faces with their mantles) and the men’s hairstyles known as copetes and guedejas (tufts and curled locks), two trends that were outlawed, like the guardainfante, in the spring of 1639.Footnote ²⁴ But the guardainfante was a concrete material object that has left traceable footprints in the historical record. These sources include Inquisition trials, letters and poems written by women, artisan account records, and lesser-known portraits that are not of sufficient quality to hang on museum walls but that are of historical interest nonetheless. This expanded body of evidence reinserts women’s voices and experiences into the historical narrative about the guardainfante and forces a reevaluation of long-standing assumptions. The history of the guardainfante proves to have striking parallels to polemical women’s fashions from other times and places, most notably the corset in Europe and foot-binding in China. In their important revisionist histories of corsets and foot-binding, Valerie Steele and Dorothy Ko found that women played a significant role in creating and perpetuating the fashions that confined them, and that they did not have universally negative experiences with them.Footnote ²⁵ The same can be said of the Spanish guardainfante.

This article seeks to offer a new history of the guardainfante that accounts for the variety of experiences that real women had with it. The focus here is on the Spanish court and capital of Madrid, with brief excursions to other European and Latin American cities. This investigation proceeds chronologically, beginning in the 1630s with the invention of the guardainfante and the initial outburst of hostile reactions that it engendered. The ban of 1639 was followed by a debate about its enforcement, in which women voiced strong opinions. The outlawed style rose to the pinnacle of its popularity during the reign of Queen Mariana of Austria (1649–65), and declined only after Philip IV’s death in 1665. But the story does not end there, for the guardainfante proved to be stubbornly persistent and reappeared in the later eighteenth century when the pannier — known as the tontillo in Spain — came into style at the courts of Europe and remained in fashion until the French Revolution.Footnote ²⁶ While every effort is made here to emphasize women’s contributions to the fashion, it is important to acknowledge the impossibility of determining how much choice women actually had in wearing the guardainfante. In many ways it is most difficult of all to know what role was played by the royal women who are the best-known models of the style, since the private, personal experiences of these individuals were so thoroughly subsumed to the public, political exigencies of the state. While the sources indicate that at least some seventeenth-century Spanish women were making strategic decisions about their clothing, presumably their male relatives were involved in purchasing and permitting what they wore. What is certain is that women played a crucial role in making, disseminating, and debating the guardainfante, which inspired such passionate political debate in seventeenth-century Spain.

Hostile Reactions against the New Fashion, 1634–39

The origins of the guardainfante are obscure, but the backlash against it is well documented: the new fashion evoked a hostile, even violent, response in print, on stage, in the pulpits, and in the streets of Madrid in the 1630s.Footnote ²⁷ There was probably some political motivation behind this negative reaction, for the new style, which was considered to be French in origin, first appeared at a time when Spain was at war with France.Footnote ²⁸ But even more relevant was the war between the sexes, for critics of the guardainfante saw it as a weapon that women were using to subvert male authority. The shape and size of the guardainfante contributed to this perception: its circumference took up a great deal of space, gave women control over a wide perimeter around their own bodies, and kept men at arm’s length. The cavernous space beneath its stiff hoops provoked suspicions that women were using their hoopskirts to hide things from men. One male critic called the guardainfante a “fools-trap,” something that women used to trick men and make them look foolish.Footnote ²⁹ Another critic compared women wearing guardainfantes to sirens or harpies — woman on top, monster on bottom — with the power to seduce men and destroy them.Footnote ³⁰

The critics’ gravest concern was that women were using their guardainfantes to conceal pregnancies resulting from sexual liaisons out of wedlock. This is an accusation that has been levied against all kinds of hoopskirts in different times and places, from the Spanish verdugado in the late 1400s to the English hoop petticoat in the eighteenth century.Footnote ³¹ The association between the guardainfante and pregnancy has been especially pervasive and enduring, even though there is no historical evidence to support this claim, and despite portraiture revealing that the guardainfante was worn with a corseted bodice with a very narrow waist that was extremely ill suited to conceal a belly swollen with child. The myth of the guardainfante as a device that women used to hide pregnancies has its origins in seventeenth-century polemical literature and works of fiction. This commonplace first appeared in a 1635 treatise against “abuses” in cosmetics, shoes, hairpieces, guardainfantes, and other sundry items by the Dominican author Tomás Ramón (1569–1640). The author claimed that any woman wearing a guardainfante would fall under suspicion and have her reputation tarnished by the garment, since even children knew that the skirt was used to hide shameful pregnancies.Footnote ³²

The following year, Alonso Carranza published his “discourse against evil dresses and lascivious adornments,” in which he explained that the guardainfante could hide pregnancies because “the girth of this inflated dress, which begins with great proportion from the waist, gives them the opportunity to go out nine and ten months pregnant without it being noticeable.”Footnote ³³ Alonso de Castillo Solórzano used the guardainfante’s reputation for hiding pregnancies as a plot point in his short story “El disfrazado” (“The Disguised,” 1649), in which Doña Clara, seduced with false promises of marriage, becomes pregnant and is able to hide her shameful condition from her older brother thanks to the new fashion. As the unfortunate young woman explains, “this new use of the guardainfante taken from France allowed me to conceal my error.”Footnote ³⁴

Critics who accused women of using their guardainfantes to incubate bastard children also made the seemingly contradictory claim that the farthingale impeded women from becoming pregnant (by their husbands) and caused miscarriages (of legitimate pregnancies).Footnote ³⁵ Carranza argued that guardainfantes “are detrimental to reproduction” for many reasons. First of all, women wearing the garment missed out on physical exercise, which would lead to constipation and sterility. In addition, the wide opening at the bottom of the hoopskirt admitted too much cold air into the reproductive organs, while the hot and heavy layers of skirts worn over it led to a dry, overheated uterus. Should conception occur under such inhospitable conditions, the weight of a woman’s skirts would put so much pressure on the hips and kidneys that they would cause spontaneous abortions.Footnote ³⁶ In Reforma de trages (The reform of dress, 1638), the learned Bartolomé Jiménez Patón likewise claimed that guardainfantes covered up illicit pregnancies (and thus encouraged sexual activity out of wedlock) and caused miscarriages of legitimate ones.Footnote ³⁷ Arias Gonzalo published the sole treatise speaking out in defense of the guardainfante in the 1630s, the Memorial en defensa de las mvgeres de España, y de los vestidos, y adornos de que vsan (Memorial in defense of the women of Spain and of the dresses and adornments that they use, 1636), but he excused himself from the debate over reproduction by writing that it was inappropriate for jurists to get involved in issues that rightfully belonged to fathers in consultation with medical doctors.Footnote ³⁸

The confusing and contradictory discourse about the guardainfante and reproduction reflects an anxiety that women who wore the garment were not fulfilling their primary duty, which was to provide legitimate heirs of unquestionable parentage. This was only one of the many ways that the guardainfante seemed to subvert traditional values. In the 1630s, the expectations for female comportment had changed little from the ideals that had been outlined in Juan Luis Vives’s De Institutione Feminae Christianae (Education of a christian woman, 1523) and Luis de León’s La perfecta casada (The perfect wife, 1583), conduct manuals for women that were often cited by critics of the guardainfante. According to those sixteenth-century authors, the ideal woman was silent and agreeable. She worked hard inside the home to fulfill her domestic chores, and she avoided going out in public whenever possible. She dressed cleanly but modestly and shunned cosmetics and opulent attire, although a married woman might have to make up her face and dress more lavishly if this was what her husband wanted.Footnote ³⁹ A woman who wore a guardainfante — which required skirts made of many yards of expensive fabric to cover it — was guilty of paying too much attention to her appearance and indulging in what Vives called “competition in adornment,” which had grave repercussions.Footnote ⁴⁰ According to this train of thought, a woman who dressed so competitively would want to leave the home and be seen in public, which would compromise her reputation and bring shame upon her household.

The impact that the guardainfante had on a woman’s ability to move about freely was a major point of discussion among the garment’s critics and defenders. All agreed that the guardainfante restricted women’s movements, although they disagreed on whether this was a good or a bad thing. Alonso Carranza, author of the Discourse against Evil Dresses and Lascivious Adornments, was concerned that upper-class women who wore guardainfantes would not fulfill their domestic duties because they could not fit into the smaller rooms of the house (closets and servants’ quarters) and thus were restricted to living lives of leisure in the grand rooms of their homes (bedrooms and the women’s quarters known as the estrado). The sedentary lifestyle imposed upon them by the large hoopskirt was dangerous to these women’s health, Carranza argued.Footnote ⁴¹ In his rebuttal of Carranza, Arias Gonzalo agreed that, yes, the guardainfante restricted women’s movements, but he argued that this was actually a benefit of the garment. “No nation, much less Spain, has allowed … for women to be taught to jump, run, and fight like men, which was only permitted to the infamous gladiatrices,” Gonzalo explained. “And thus it is better for them to wear such a heavy and cumbersome garment, so that they can walk less and run not at all,” he concluded.Footnote ⁴² The Englishman Richard Lassels (ca. 1603–68), a Catholic priest who observed the guardainfante fashion in Genoa, poked fun at the spectacle of women struggling to fit into carriages and navigate the city’s narrow streets in their wide farthingales. In his assessment, the attention-getting garment was to the husbands’ benefit, for “if all this Bulk of Clothes, which make the women here look like Haycocks with armes and heads, be allowed them by their wise husbands, to render them more visible, and less able to go privately into any suspected houses, it’s good policy: otherwise, most certain it is, that the wives gownes cheat horribly the Husbands breeches of almost all the stuff.”Footnote ⁴³

While critics debated the pros and cons of the guardainfante’s incommodiousness, playwrights appropriated the new hoopskirt as a comedic prop. An entremés (intermission piece) by Luis Quiñones de Benavente called El guarda-infante reflects the strong hostility and Carnivalesque violence that characterized male responses to the guardainfante in the mid-1630s.Footnote ⁴⁴ This skit, first performed in Madrid in the fall of 1634, starred the actress Josefa Román playing a character of the same name who was a hoopskirted harpy, a quarrelsome and sharp-tongued woman wearing an exaggeratedly large guardainfante.Footnote ⁴⁵ The slapstick skit also featured the popular comic actor Juan Rana in the role of a country-bumpkin mayor. In the opening scene, Juan Rana has just returned from a trip out of town to discover that a woman named Beatricilla has stolen his mayoral office (symbolized by a phallic staff, or vara) during his absence. Juan Rana vows to take revenge on all women “walking around so wide” in their guardainfantes.Footnote ⁴⁶ “Now women do not fit in the world,” the mayor sings in unison with a policeman, the two men expressing their fear that women wearing guardainfantes are encroaching on public space and usurping their authority.Footnote ⁴⁷

The men in Quiñones de Benavente’s skit enact their revenge upon Josefa Román, who is arrested for blocking traffic in the public plaza with her enormous guardainfante. Josefa first appears before the audience as a prisoner when she is dragged on stage by a thick rope tied around her waist. Then she is manhandled and mocked by a series of men who take turns stripping away the elements of her costume, including her hoops, straw padding, and layers of skirts. Josefa Román remains defiant throughout her humiliation: “When you undress the women, mayor,” she taunts Juan Rana, “your purse will pay when you have to dress them again.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In her guardainfante, Josefa Román caused a public commotion and threatened to undermine men’s authority. But in the end she is stripped and shamed and left on stage in her undergarments; social order is restored as the men prove that they still wear the pants.

According to an anonymous court chronicler, actual women in the streets of Madrid suffered harassment similar to that inflicted upon the actress Josefa Román on the stage: “Young men go running after women who wear the guardainfantes, whistling at them like cows, and subjecting them to insufferable jeers and taunts,” the chronicler reported.Footnote ⁴⁹ This harassment of women wearing guardainfantes is reminiscent of the charivari, or cencerrada as it was known in Spain, which was the ritual humiliation — typically carried out by young unmarried men — of adulterous wives, cuckolded spouses, and other individuals who violated gender norms in early modern Europe.Footnote ⁵⁰ According to the chronicler, the attacks on women wearing guardainfantes escalated and led to bloodshed in October of 1636, when pages and husbands defending guardainfante-wearing women killed two of their molesters. The Crown responded to the incident by posting mounted guards in the streets to contain the violence.Footnote ⁵¹

There was a great deal of public pressure on King Philip IV to outlaw the guardainfante, which was causing so much trouble. According to the Jesuit Sebastián González, a royal proclamation against the garment was issued on 12 October 1636,Footnote ⁵² but the law was not enforced until the publication of a new sumptuary law on 13 April 1639. In the interim, critics — including the king’s own preacher, the Jesuit Francisco Aguado — continued to issue harsh criticisms against the guardainfante, and women continued to wear it.Footnote ⁵³

The Guardainfante on Trial: The Inquisition Case of María De La Encarnación, Spring of 1639

A woman who publicly wore a guardainfante in Madrid attracted attention and exposed herself to suspicion and criticism. One such woman was María de Legarda, the wife of one of the king’s mounted guards. María claimed to be a holy woman, or beata, and she went by the name María de la Encarnación (Mary of the Incarnation).Footnote ⁵⁴ Unlike cloistered nuns, beatas like María de la Encarnación lived in the outside world and could be married. María had religious visions and went into raptures whenever she heard Mass, took communion, or saw an image of Christ, and she acquired a popular following in Madrid. In the spring of 1639, she went on trial before the Spanish Inquisition for “false revelations and other frauds.”Footnote ⁵⁵ She also was accused of having an inappropriate relationship with her confessor, who frequently ate dinner at her house. Twenty-eight years old at the time, María was a striking raven-haired woman “of attractive appearance and dishonest dress,” in the words of Inquisitor Juan Adán de la Parra, who prosecuted her case.Footnote ⁵⁶ María’s “dishonest dress” included a guardainfante, which featured prominently in her Inquisition files. When María de la Encarnación went on trial, her guardainfante was used against her. The extensive documentation gathered by the Inquisition in the course of her two trials (1639–41 and 1648–49) offers valuable insights into the experience of a woman who wore the guardainfante and reveals how the garment shaped her neighbors’ and the ecclesiastical authorities’ perceptions of her.

María de la Encarnación’s appearance had attracted attention and criticism from Church authorities even before her first Inquisition trial. According to a thirty-four-year-old priest named Juan de la Fuente, other priests were gossiping about her, “saying that it cannot be good to wear such finery and guardainfantes with such sanctitude and to take communion every single day.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Another priest testified that María was refused communion at the church of the Hospital del Buen Suceso until she stopped causing scenes and changed her language, behavior, and clothing — specifically her guardainfante.Footnote ⁵⁸ A Jesuit named Juan de Eusebio testified that he had spoken with María’s confessor about the need for her to give up the hoopskirt.Footnote ⁵⁹ To these men of the church, the guardainfante called into question María’s claims to be a beata, for such a religious woman was expected to dress with exceptional modesty. Back in 1509, another beata named María de Santo Domingo (ca. 1485–ca. 1524) had come under scrutiny for wearing colorful skirts, a coral necklace, and a French hat.Footnote ⁶⁰ A guardainfante brought suspicion upon any woman who wore it, but a beata — who always ran the risk of being accused of fakery or sorcery — was especially vulnerable to public scrutiny of her appearance.

Inquisitors asked witnesses “what kind of clothes María Legarda wears both in and outside of the home,” and in response they delivered detailed descriptions of her dress and grooming.Footnote ⁶¹ According to this testimony, María had a reputation for being quite preoccupied with her appearance, always carefully made up and dressed very fancily, whether she was going out or staying at home. Her signature style was the large guardainfante that she wore everywhere. Witnesses emphasized the size of María’s hoopskirt: “She goes out in a guardainfante that is not small,” a seventy-five-year-old Madrid native named Antonio de Alcocer reported.Footnote ⁶² María wore all of the latest fashions along with her guardainfante, much like the unidentified woman whom Diego Velázquez depicted in his famous portrait known as Lady with a Fan, which is usually dated to around 1640 (fig. 5). While some scholars have claimed that the Lady with a Fan, with her lowered neckline and farthingale, is dressed in French costume, Amalia Descalzo Lorenzo has argued convincingly that Velázquez’s anonymous subject is in fact dressed in the Spanish style.Footnote ⁶³ The Lady with a Fan wears an early version of the guardainfante, with a gold crucifix resting on her padded hip. Like Velázquez’s seductive subject, María de la Encarnación wore her guardainfante with the low-cut, tightly fitted bodice that was known as an escotado. The bodice and skirt worn by the Lady with a Fan are dark brown; María de la Encarnación’s were black. María wore a fine silk mantle over her hair but left much of it uncovered to reveal a forelock styled on her temple. She wore choker necklaces made of pearls and coral, and jet rings that set off her white hands. Her outermost skirts were richly trimmed with decorations; beneath them she wore layers of colorful petticoats, flashes of which could be seen when she walked. On her feet, high-soled black platform shoes called chapines (known as chopines in Italy) were decorated with silver studs.

Figure 5. Diego Velázquez. Lady with a Fan, ca. 1640. Wallace Collection, London. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The witnesses who testified about María’s appearance characterized her as a woman who was proud and profane, and they described her guardainfante as an example of her immodesty and indulgence (along with her tendency to drink too much wine). “She seemed very bad to me,” a woman named Doña Ángela de Llote y Ribera testified during María’s second trial, “for being arrogant and immodest.”Footnote ⁶⁴ But there was one witness who came to María’s defense. María de Ogeda, the forty-year-old wife of a barber surgeon, testified that the accused seemed to her to be a very spiritual person free of scandal or vice. As proof of this, she offered that she had seen María de la Encarnación wearing a cilice — the spiked metal band that devout Catholics wore as an instrument of self-mortification — beneath her guardainfante.Footnote ⁶⁵ This witness saw no contradiction in wearing the penitential cilice with the fashionable hoopskirt, an opinion that directly contradicted the churchmen who claimed that the guardainfante was incompatible with religion.Footnote ⁶⁶

When asked by the Inquisitors why she dressed in a guardainfante with party clothes, chapines, and her hair uncovered, María de la Encarnación “responded that it was to the liking of her husband, because he liked his wife to be very elegant.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This was a strong argument, for Church authorities generally agreed with Saint Thomas Aquinas that married women should dress to please their husbands in order to keep their men faithful.Footnote ⁶⁸ In 1635, the Jesuit Bernardo de Villegas wrote somewhat peevishly that a married woman could indeed dress up and wear makeup if her husband was one of those “men so stupid that they like such tricks and enjoy being fooled by false beauty.” “But a woman devoted to Christ had no excuse,” he insisted, “because her Husband is only content with the beauty of her soul, and desires that she forget that of her body.”Footnote ⁶⁹ As a married beata, María de la Encarnación was in an impossible position: she could not dress to please both her husband and the Church. In any case, the profile of María de la Encarnación that emerges from her thick Inquisition files suggests that she was probably dressing, at least to some degree, to please herself. María evidently craved attention, and she courted public scandal with her confessor, which made her husband look like a cuckold. If María de la Encarnación wanted to be seen and heard, then the guardainfante was a means to those ends, for by wearing a large hoopskirt this small-framed woman attracted a great deal of attention in the bustling court city of Madrid.

The timing of María’s trial raises the possibility that her notorious hoopskirt may have played a role in bringing her to the attention of the Inquisition. Witness testimony was gathered in February, March, and April of 1639, which was precisely when tensions over the guardainfante had reached a crescendo in Madrid. While witnesses were delivering their testimony about María de la Encarnación’s ostentatious appearance, rumors were swirling around the court capital that the king finally was about to issue a ban on the hoopskirt. On 29 March a Jesuit court observer wrote: “Every day the arrival is awaited of some royal decrees that already have been resolved, which among other things include the reform of clothing, especially of women, who will have their guardainfantes taken away.”Footnote ⁷⁰ María de la Encarnación’s Inquisition trial was caught up in the controversy over the guardainfante, and the garment helped build the Holy Office’s case against her. She was found guilty and sentenced to exile from Madrid for four years.Footnote ⁷¹ After her first trial and sentence to exile by the Spanish Inquisition, María returned to Madrid where she was once again tried and convicted by the Spanish Inquisition in 1648, now approaching forty years old and still wearing her guardainfante.Footnote ⁷²

Making and Breaking the Law: The Guardainfante Ban and Its Aftermath, 1639–49

At three o’clock on the afternoon of 13 April 1639, King Philip IV’s much-anticipated law forbidding the guardainfante to all but prostitutes was announced in Madrid to the accompaniment of trumpets and drums: “The King our Lord orders that no woman of any rank or class may wear the guardainfante, or another device, or similar costume, except for those women with a license from the authorities who openly make ill use of their bodies” (fig. 6).Footnote ⁷³ The ban on the guardainfante forbade any skirt measuring over eight varas (6.68 meters, or 7.3 yards) in diameter in an effort to stop women from subverting the law by using some other kind of invention to widen their skirts. The decree also banned the low-cut bodice known as the escotado, which was typically worn with the guardainfante. A woman caught violating the new law would be charged a fine and would have her offending garments confiscated; a second offense would result in double the fine plus exile from the court. The tailors who made the garments were treated more harshly: their fines were twice as heavy, and they were threatened with exile for a first offense and imprisonment for a repeat violation.

Figure 6. King Philip IV. Sumptuary law banning the guardainfante for all women except for prostitutes. Madrid, 1639. Historical and Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library.

The Crown may have had concerns that the police would not be willing or able to enforce the ban, and alguaciles (court bailiffs) were threatened with suspension if they failed to execute the new law rigorously.Footnote ⁷⁴ An anachronistic legend claims that three noble sisters known as las Gilimonas sassily flouted the king’s proclamation the day after it was issued by “swaggering and jingling up and down the Prado in the widest guardainfantes,” in the words of the nineteenth-century English historian Martin Andrew Sharp Hume.Footnote ⁷⁵ But all indications are that the king’s officials successfully enforced the ban on the guardainfante in the summer of 1639, thus restoring public order and demonstrating royal authority.Footnote ⁷⁶ The following year, a collection of poetry published in Zaragoza, Romances varios de diversos autores (Various ballads by diverse authors, 1640) included four poems inspired by the recent sumptuary laws; in one of them, a woman proclaims that the defeat of guardainfante is Philip IV’s triumph:

Another poem written in the voice of a personified guardainfante laments how the ban transformed the fashion that had been perceived as such a menace into a laughingstock:

In the aftermath of the ban, the guardainfante was in fact treated more like a joke than a threat. Three days after the proclamation was announced, a Jesuit observer at court wrote that the ban on the hoopskirt was being laughed at by the idle,Footnote ⁷⁹ while the court chronicler José Pellicer de Tovar described the sight of confiscated guardainfantes hanging from the Court Jail as a humorous distraction in an otherwise cheerless summer when Madrid was besieged by bad news from abroad about the war with France.Footnote ⁸⁰

As part of the fun, Luis Quiñones de Benavente wrote a humorous jácara (intermission song) in which a lady mourns the death of her guardainfante and complains that bailiffs are measuring women’s petticoats and taking away all of their hoops (except for their earrings).Footnote ⁸¹ But the ban on the guardainfante did not sound the death knell of the controversial style. Efforts to enforce the law slackened after the initial dragnet in the summer of 1639, and women resumed wearing guardainfantes within the year. The court observer León Pinelo explained that the outlawed trends (including escotados and guedejas as well as guardainfantes) returned organically without malice or intention. He compared these garments’ “secret augmentation, that grows without sensing, that spreads out without thinking” to the leaves of a tree that grow daily, unnoticed, and transform a tree that “not long before was bare” into one that is “leafy and dense with foliage.”Footnote ⁸²

In the fall of 1640, the newly appointed president of the Council of Castile, Diego de Castejón y Fonseca, tried to reinforce the ban on the guardainfante. “Madrid is all stirred up because the new Mister President has wished to carry forward the law of the guardainfantes,” Pellicer de Tovar recorded on 11 September, and he reported that this was a new source of amusement at the court: “Yesterday was a day of great laughter in Madrid when they began to execute it. And this is the greatest novelty.”Footnote ⁸³ The ban on the guardainfante quelled the public unrest that the fashion had caused, but the question of whether or not to enforce the law inspired a new debate. Spanish women contributed to the controversy, voicing different opinions much in the same way as outspoken early modern Italian women like Nicolosa Sanuti (fl. 1453), Laura Cereta (1469–99), and Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653) responded to sumptuary legislation that affected them.Footnote ⁸⁴ While male court observers unfailingly treated the ban on the guardainfante as a joke, the few women who left written records of their reactions took the issue much more seriously.

A noblewoman named Francisca Páez de Colindres (fl. ca. 1640) interpreted the movement to enforce the law against the guardainfante as a genuine threat, and she responded with a furious satirical poem addressed to the president.Footnote ⁸⁵ The author, who at one point adopts the voice of a male member of the council, boldly presents herself as an expert advisor, as someone to whom the president must listen and with whom he must reckon.Footnote ⁸⁶ She opens with an ad hominem attack on President Castejón y Fonseca and goes on to denounce his efforts to curb women’s dress: “in fact my friend / this new order has been an act of madness.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Countering the critics of the guardainfante, she insists that women’s hoopskirts cannot be blamed for the problems plaguing Castile:

The poet describes Castile as a dissolute and debauched world-turned-upside-down where murder and thievery go unpunished, usury and sodomy flourish, simony and flattery rule, and gambling and pimping are celebrated. This is the fault of the lawyers, judges, and noblemen who run the country, she explains, not the blameless women who wear guardainfantes to plump their slim hips. In the final lines of the poem, Páez de Colindres reminds the president of his humble origins and warns him to set aside worldly things and focus on the fate of his own soul — and to leave women alone.

The president of Castile’s efforts to enforce the ban on the guardainfante came to naught. Far from being eliminated by the 1639 ban, the guardainfante was becoming even more widely disseminated, including outside of Madrid: there are accounts of guardainfantes as far afield as Mexico City and Genoa by the early 1640s.Footnote ⁸⁹ A letter written by a Jesuit observer in Madrid in April of 1644 illustrates just how impotent the ban on the guardainfante had become: according to this rather fantastic account, a woman wearing a guardainfante visited a Portuguese spy being held at the Court Jail and used the cavity of her hoopskirt to smuggle in jail-breaking supplies, including crowbars, files, and two ladders. After the spy was caught with the tools in his cell, visitation rules were changed so that guards would monitor all visits, and female visitors would be separated from prisoners by a thick grille.Footnote ⁹⁰ The new rules suggest that it was impossible to stop women from wearing the guardainfante, even at the Court Jail where confiscated hoopskirts had hung from the façade only a few years earlier. This supposedly true tale is one of numerous accounts of women using their guardainfantes to hide lawbreakers or sneak contraband into or out of prisons with impunity, thus subverting the male authorities even in the most authoritarian of institutions.Footnote ⁹¹

If the king truly had wanted to get rid of the guardainfante, then Philip IV would have begun with the women in his own household. The most effective way to enforce a sumptuary law was for the royal family to set an example, which is precisely what Philip IV did when he successfully outlawed the large ruffed collar that had been popular in his father’s time and personally modeled the golilla (small starched collar) that took its place in 1623.Footnote ⁹² But Philip IV’s own wives and daughters all wore the forbidden hoopskirt. That royal women wore the guardainfante after it had been outlawed indicates that the garment somehow served the Crown’s agenda. The most likely explanation lies in the guardainfante’s scandalous reputation: the hoopskirt was associated with pregnancy, and a royal woman’s primary function was to bear heirs. Thus, when worn by a princess or a queen, the controversial garment promised fertility and the political stability that came with an uncontested succession. When Isabella of Bourbon, the first queen of Spain to wear the guardainfante, adopted the style, it may have reinforced her public image as a successful queen who had borne a son, Prince Baltasar Carlos (1629–46), who lived long enough to be declared heir to the throne.

Queen Isabella of Bourbon died unexpectedly on 6 October 1644, leaving Philip IV devastated. “I find myself in the most miserable state of grief that can possibly exist, for I lost in only one person everything that you can lose in this life,” he wrote in a grief-soaked letter addressed to a cloistered Franciscan nun named Sister María de Ágreda (1602–65).Footnote ⁹³ The king and the nun had met for the first time at her Castilian convent in July of 1643 and had initiated what would become a lifelong correspondence.Footnote ⁹⁴ In her role as his spiritual advisor, Sister María de Ágreda tried to convince the king to pursue “the correction of the customs and general vices that have contaminated Spain, and change the clothes, which are those that ignite the flames of this fire” in order to better protect and defend the monarchy by winning divine favor.Footnote ⁹⁵ The nun, who herself dressed in a brown habit of coarse wool worn against her skin and eschewed shoes for wooden planks tied to her feet, believed that the king needed to rein in the decadent fashions of their times.Footnote ⁹⁶ With the death of Queen Isabella of Bourbon, the nun saw an opportunity to press her agenda and convince the king to enforce his inert ban on the guardainfante.

Sister María de Ágreda wrote to the king describing a series of visions in which the dead queen appeared to her from purgatory: “She appeared to me dressed with the courtly finery and guardainfantes that ladies wear, but all of it was a flame of fire… . She then said to me: ‘Mother … tell the King, when you see him, to try with all his power to halt the use of these terribly profane clothes that are used in the world, because God is very offended and angered by them and they are the cause of the condemnation of many souls; I am suffering great punishments on account of them and for the courtly finery that I wore.’”Footnote ⁹⁷ Isabella of Bourbon’s sufferings would be much alleviated, Sister María recounted, if the king were to follow these instructions. Sister María de Ágreda reported that she continued to have these visions until the queen’s soul was released from purgatory after thirteen months, a long sentence despite all the masses that were said on her behalf.Footnote ⁹⁸

No letter survives that conveys the king’s response to Sister María de Ágreda’s disturbing visions,Footnote ⁹⁹ but his subsequent action — or inaction — reveals that he did not heed the nun’s advice, for he did nothing to reinvigorate or reinforce the law against the guardainfante. In 1649, five years after Isabella of Bourbon’s death, the king married his fourteen-year-old niece Mariana of Austria (1634–96), who famously modeled the outlawed fashion. During her reign from 1649 to 1665, the guardainfante grew bigger than ever in physical size, global dissemination, and political importance. In the last fifteen years of his reign, the garment that Philip IV had banned from all but prostitutes was worn in public by his wife and daughters, and it became an important tool of international diplomacy and a symbol of Spain that was recognized around the globe.

The Zenith of the Guardainfante, 1649–65

Early in Mariana of Austria’s reign, the guardainfante evolved into the iconic shape and style that is well known thanks to Diego Velázquez’s celebrated court portraits. Among them is a full-length portrait of the eighteen-year-old queen that was made at the request of her father, the Holy Roman emperor, the year after she had left the Austrian court for Madrid (fig. 7).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ A comparison between this picture and an anonymous portrait of Mariana’s predecessor, Queen Isabella of Bourbon (fig. 4), which had been painted about ten years earlier, reveals how the guardainfante and the garments and accessories that were worn with it had evolved over the course of a decade. First and foremost, the hoopskirt has grown larger and wider at the hip, creating a bell shape that no longer bears any resemblance to the conical verdugado. The peplum — an overskirt attached to the bodice — has grown proportionally larger. Isabella of Bourbon’s relatively small peplum, long at the front and short on the sides, has a vertical orientation; in contrast, Mariana’s large gored overskirt, heavily outlined with thick braid, emphasizes the width of her farthingale and draws the eye to her lower half. Upper-body garments and accessories also developed in relation to the expanded guardainfante, whose bell shape is echoed in Mariana of Austria’s chin-length wig made out of plaits of hair, jewels, bows, and feathers attached to a wire framework. While Isabella of Bourbon’s high lace collar covers her neck, Mariana of Austria’s low, wide collar leaves her neck exposed. Even the jewelry has grown in scale: Mariana’s bodice is dominated by a large broach placed front and center on her chest.

Figure 7. The iconic guardainfante, as worn by Queen Mariana of Austria, second wife of Philip IV. Diego Velázquez. Queen Mariana of Austria, ca. 1652. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

While few if any of her subjects could afford the queen’s crown jewels, many could emulate her style by wearing a guardainfante. Whatever her natural shape, a woman who wore such a hoopskirt could transform her figure to achieve this regal silhouette. In this way, an artificial garment like the guardainfante, which can change any body type into the fashionable shape of the day, arguably is a more equalizing fashion than body-skimming clothes that are worn without structured undergarments.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Mariana’s style was widely imitated in Spain and abroad by women representing a surprisingly broad swath of society, and the guardainfante was worn on unexpectedly diverse occasions that extended far beyond posing for a portrait.

Archival documents from the Hospital de Santiago in Toledo reveal that the guardainfante was worn by women of various ages and stages of life in the 1650s. A notary recorded in detail the clothes that patients were wearing when they checked into this specialized hospital devoted to the treatment of syphilis.Footnote ¹⁰² Between 1654 and 1661, five female patients entered the Hospital de Santiago wearing guardainfantes. Among the five, three were from Toledo, and the other two were from the smaller neighboring towns of Ajofrín and Yébenes. Three were single, one was married, and one was widowed. One of the women was identified as a doña, an honorific title indicating her elevated social status; the ranks of the other four women went unremarked. They wore their guardainfantes with a uniform of sorts: a black mantle of silk or wool; a woolen bodice in black, silver, or gray-brown; a white shirt; and an overskirt of brown or silver wool. Beneath their sober outer garments they wore layers of red, green, and blue underskirts. All of the women were wearing at least one garment identified as old, such as an old red flannel cape, old shoes and stockings, or an old silk mantle. They also wore luxury items including gilded silk stockings and skirts decorated with silver fringe. Historian Cristian Berco has suggested that these women were dressing in their very finest clothing while embarking upon the humiliating public action of entering the syphilis hospital in the city center.Footnote ¹⁰³ If their illness was treated early on, these women were very likely to reemerge from the hospital in just a few weeks’ time, and thus they had good reason to salvage their reputations by choosing their clothes carefully.

The guardainfante also was worn by women outside of peninsular Spain, most notably in Portugal, Latin America, and in Italian cities under Spanish influence, such as Genoa and Milan. In Mexico City, the guardainfante was considered splendid dress for a gala occasion, according to a 1640 poem written by María de Estrada Medinilla. The poem describing the public celebration of the Spanish viceroy’s ceremonial entry into Mexico City was written for the author’s cousin, a cloistered nun who could not see the festivities herself. María de Estrada Medinilla explains that she chose not to wear her guardainfante because she was unable to use her coach during the processions, and the large hoopskirt would have made it too difficult for her to travel on foot.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Visual and material evidence shows that women in Mexico wore their guardainfantes with dresses decorated in a distinctively Mexican fashion with sequins imported across the Pacific by the Manila galleon. There is a dark-green velvet dress covered with silver sequins, which is believed to have been made to be worn over a guardainfante, in the collection of the Museo Nacional de Historia del Castillo de Chapultepec; the dress reportedly belonged to Doña Leonor Carreto (d. 1674), wife of the Spanish viceroy in Mexico, who would have worn guardainfantes at court in Madrid before leaving for Mexico in 1664.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The guardainfantes worn in Latin America were made of materials as international as the Spanish empire itself: listonería (belting) for guardainfantes was imported from Spanish Naples and sold at shops in Santiago de Chile. Historian Isabel Cruz de Amenábar has concluded that the guardainfante was not in general use in Chile, as it seems to have been in Spain, although she has found archival evidence that it was owned by elite women, such as Ana Ternero y Arrieta, whose 1659 inventory included a guardainfante amid her sumptuous wardrobe.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Historian Paola Venturelli found a guardainfante listed in the 1654 inventory of a noble family in Milan, where women dressed “alla spagnola” with the Spanish hoopskirt.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In Italian cities, Spanish styles competed with French fashions as the two nations fought for supremacy in Italian territory in the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Spanish fashions were especially strong in Genoa, where the guardainfante was popular in the 1640s.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Francesco Fulvio Frugoni was inspired to write a 179-page “poema giocoso” (“jocular poem”) called La gvard’infanteide (1643), which he dedicated to the “beautiful women of Genoa.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ The Englishman Richard Lassels, who visited Italy five times between 1637 and 1668, described seeing women in Genoa wearing guardainfantes in his posthumously published Description of Italy (1670): “I found all the great Ladies here to go like the Donnas of Spain in Guardinfantas, that is, in horrible overgrown Fartingals of whalebone, which being put about in the waste of the Lady, and full as broad on both sides as she can reach with her hands, bear out her Coats in such a huffing manner, that she appears to be as broad as long.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Lassels explained that the Genoese dressed in the Spanish style in repudiation of the French, whom they despised: “the Genuesi lean much to the Spanish Faction, and Fashions following Faction, they lean also much to the Spanish Fashion both in humor and apparel.”Footnote ¹¹² The guardainfante marked a clear distinction between French and Spanish supporters, especially since farthingales of any kind were passé de mode in France.

Since fashion followed faction, as Richard Lassels so aptly put it, clothing publicly broadcast the loyalties of a royal woman who occupied a liminal position between the courts and countries of her father and husband.Footnote ¹¹³ Before, during, and after her marriage, a princess’s clothing was a symbol of state, and a change of clothes was a sign of subjugation. Loaded with political meaning, clothing had to be selected with great care when a marriage was taking place between enemy nations. As a distinctive and unmistakable symbol of Spain, the guardainfante came to play an important role in international relations. This was especially true when it came to the negotiation of royal marriages, when clothing was carefully choreographed and sartorial mistakes could have lasting political repercussions. The guardainfante was front and center in the marriages of three Iberian princesses in the 1660s: the infanta María Teresa’s 1660 marriage to Louis XIV of France, the wedding of the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza to Charles II of England in 1662, and the infanta Margarita’s union with the Holy Roman emperor Leopold I in 1666.

As part of the Peace of the Pyrenees that ended war between France and Spain in 1659, King Louis XIV of France was engaged to the infanta María Teresa (1638–83), daughter of Philip IV and Isabella of Bourbon. French observers fixated upon the Spanish infanta’s guardainfante in the events leading up to the wedding. When the French diplomat Antoine de Grammont went to Madrid to arrange the marriage, he reported back home that María Teresa’s large guardainfante had made it impossible for him to assess her actual physique.Footnote ¹¹⁴ María Teresa wore the guardainfante beneath an embroidered white satin gown for her first meeting with her future husband on the Isle of Pheasants. The event was commemorated in a tapestry designed by the French artist Charles le Brun, which depicts the infanta, standing behind her father, wearing a very large guardainfante, seen here in a print made after Le Brun’s design (fig. 8).Footnote ¹¹⁵ The French lady-in-waiting Françoise Bertaut de Motteville (ca. 1621–89), who was half Spanish herself, had most unflattering things to say about María Teresa’s attire. Madame de Motteville described the infanta’s guardainfante as a “machine half round and monstrous” that was “flattened a bit in the front and the back, and swelled out on the sides.” When Spanish women walked in their guardainfantes, she continued, “this machine moved up and down, and made for a very ugly appearance.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ María Teresa wore the guardainfante en route to France and “she took up the whole front” of the carriage “because of her gard’Infant that she did not wish to remove,” according to a French pamphlet.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Up until the last minute, the infanta’s Spanish hoopskirt kept her French audience on edge. She finally quitted her guardainfante for the marriage Mass (depicted in another Le Brun tapestry), to which she wore a hoopless dress and a cape decorated with the French fleur-de-lis.Footnote ¹¹⁸ After such a tense buildup, the removal of the guardainfante for the marriage Mass was all the more potent as a symbol of French dominance over Spain, represented by the body of María Teresa.Footnote ¹¹⁹ After the wedding on 9 June 1660, María Teresa dutifully continued to wear French-style dress as queen of France until her death in 1683.

Figure 8. The infanta María Teresa wears a guardainfante to meet her future husband, Louis XIV of France (1660). Detail from Meeting of Louis XIV and Philip IV on the Isle of Pheasants. Etching and engraving by Edmé Jeaurat, 1728, after a tapestry designed by Charles Le Brun. British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.

When the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705) married England’s Charles II in 1662, her insensitive use of the guardainfante set the stage for a fraught relationship with her subjects that would last throughout her reign as queen of England (r. 1662–85). In her native Portugal, Catherine of Braganza had been accustomed to wearing a guardainfante, as she was depicted by Dirk Stoop, a Dutch artist at the Lisbon court, on the eve of her marriage. In the portrait at the National Gallery, London (ca. 1660–61), the Portuguese princess wears a very wide guardainfante and rests her left elbow on the shelf of her hoopskirt; a black lace-trimmed overskirt is pushed back to reveal a silvery satin underskirt with a slit pocket. Stoop’s painted portrait was reproduced and disseminated in a 1662 print by William Faithorne (fig. 9). This is how Catherine was dressed when she left Lisbon for Portsmouth, where she wedded Charles II on 21 May 1662. A series of prints representing Catherine’s progress to Hampton Court clearly shows her embarking in Lisbon and disembarking in Portsmouth still wearing her wide, flat hoopskirt and flanked by a phalanx of ladies-in-waiting dressed in the same fashion.Footnote ¹²⁰ In England, the French wheel-shaped farthingale had been fashionable in the later sixteenth century but had declined after the death of Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603), and hoopskirts of any kind had been out of fashion for forty-five years by the time of Catherine’s arrival. Catherine’s Spanish-style dress thus appeared dated and absurd to an English audience.Footnote ¹²¹

Figure 9. Catherine of Braganza (ca. 1660–61). Engraving by William Faithorne, 1662, after a painting by Dirk Stoop. British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.

One of Catherine’s new subjects, the diarist John Evelyn, recorded his negative impression of the queen and her olive-skinned ladies-in-waiting in his diary entry for 30 May 1662: “the Queen arriv’d with a train of Portuguese ladies in their monstrous fardingals or guardinfantas, their complexions olivader and sufficiently unagreeable.”Footnote ¹²² Those who did not witness the queen’s arrival with their own eyes became familiar with her shockingly foreign appearance thanks to the printed images. To her English subjects, Catherine of Braganza’s guardainfante marked her as foreign, Catholic, and an ally of their Spanish enemy. As queen of England, Catherine of Braganza ultimately did abandon her hoopskirts and change into English-style dress with free-flowing skirts, as she is seen in Peter Lely’s well-known painted portraits of her. But the unpopular queen never managed to erase the negative first impression that she had made arriving in England wearing her guardainfante.

The hoopskirt that seemed so “monstrous” in Paris and London was viewed much more favorably in Vienna, a Spanish ally with a common Habsburg bond, which was the destination of the infanta Margarita (1651–73). The daughter of Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, Margarita is best known as the little girl at the center of Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) (fig. 10), which features the five-year-old infanta wearing a guardainfante almost as wide as she is tall. Ever since she was about three years old, Margarita was represented in court portraits wearing guardainfantes (although this was not necessarily her daily attire).Footnote ¹²³ The extended hoopskirts gave her child’s body a woman’s proportions with a slim waist and exaggerated hips, which suggested future fertility and fecundity. On the eve of her engagement to Holy Roman emperor Leopold I of Austria (b. 1640; r. 1658–1705), a thirteen-year-old Margarita was portrayed wearing a guardainfante beneath an orange skirt and pointing toward her belly in a gesture that promises the princess’s potential for bearing future emperors.Footnote ¹²⁴

Figure 10. The infanta Margarita, daughter of Philip IV, and a maid of honor. Detail from Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656. Museo Nacional del Prado. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Margarita consistently wore the guardainfante and only appeared in public without it during periods of significant transition: her father’s death, her marriage and move to a foreign court, and the announcement of her first pregnancy.Footnote ¹²⁵ When she left Madrid for Vienna, Margarita removed her guardainfante as a sign of respect to her new husband and home, and she won praise from the Spanish ambassador for dressing “more like a daughter of Vienna than a foreigner.”Footnote ¹²⁶ From that point forward, Margarita resumed wearing guardainfantes at the Viennese court, where the empress’s Spanish dress was a welcome symbol of her Spanish origins. During her reign as Holy Roman empress (r. 1666–73), Margarita often was portrayed wearing theatrical costumes of flowing skirts without hoops, but textual sources reveal that her habitual dress remained the guardainfante. An engraving from 1668 depicts Margarita wearing a guardainfante while seated in the audience at the opera Il Pomo d'Oro (The golden apple), which was performed in celebration of her seventeenth birthday (fig. 11).Footnote ¹²⁷ Margarita is seated front and center on a dais next to her husband; the wide, flat guardainfantes worn by the empress and her Spanish ladies-in-waiting clearly distinguish them from the slim-hipped local women in the audience. Margarita died in 1673 at the age of twenty-one, having lived almost all of her brief life in the public eye wearing the guardainfante.

Figure 11. Holy Roman empress Margarita (front and center) attending the opera Il Pomo d’Oro at the Viennese court. Detail from Sacra Cesarea Maesta, engraving by Frans Geffels after Lodovico Ottavio Burnacini. In Francesco Sbarra, La Manzana de oro (Vienna, 1668). Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.

The Decline of the Guardainfante and the Perseverance of the Fashion, 1665–1789

When Philip IV died on 17 September 1665, his widow Mariana of Austria retired her guardainfante and exchanged her embellished court dresses and wigs for an austere black-and-white habit worn with a veil that completely covered her hair.Footnote ¹²⁸ As Philip’s queen, Mariana had exerted her influence as a fashion plate, but it was wearing her widow’s weeds that she came to wield true political power. Mariana ruled for ten years as queen regent in place of her son Charles II (b. 1661; r. 1665–1700), who was not yet four years old when he was named king.Footnote ¹²⁹ Mariana no longer wore the guardainfante that she had popularized, but the style continued to flourish at the Spanish court and beyond. The hoopskirt grew larger and the neckline lowered to off the shoulder, as seen in a portrait of an unidentified lady by the court artist Juan Carreño de Miranda (fig. 12). Carreño de Miranda, who ascended to the position of head court painter thanks to Mariana’s favor in the late 1660s and early 1670s, painted portraits of high-ranking women wearing guardainfantes of varying sizes and shapes, some of them exceptionally large.Footnote ¹³⁰ The variety of styles that can be found in portraits from 1665 through the 1670s suggests that there was a lack of cohesion in women’s fashion trends in the absence of a royal role model between Mariana’s widowhood and the ascension of a new queen from France, Charles II’s first wife, Marie Louise of Orléans (b. 1662; r. 1679–89).Footnote ¹³¹

Figure 12. Juan Carreño de Miranda. Lady with a Handkerchief, ca. 1665–70. Madrid, Banco Exterior de España. Album / Art Resource, NY.

The guardainfante seems to have fallen out of general use by 1679, when the French noblewoman Marie Catherine D’Aulnoy (1650/51–1705) visited the court in Madrid. She reported that “till of late, women wore farthingales of a prodigious bigness. This fashion was very troublesome to themselves as well as others: there were hardly any doors wide enough for them to go through. But they have left them off now, and only wear them when they go to appear before the Queen’s or the King’s presence.”Footnote ¹³² According to Madame D’Aulnoy, Spanish women did not abandon farthingales altogether; rather, the guardainfante was replaced by a smaller farthingale that was made out of five or six rounds of thick copper wire that hung from one another with ribbons from the girdle to the ground.Footnote ¹³³ Portraits from the reign of Marie Louise of Orléans show Spanish women wearing skirts that are full but not stiff, pleated at a waistline that is defined by a stomacher extending from the bodice into a low, narrow point.

Nonetheless, the unfashionable guardainfante remained obligatory at the court, where Mariana of Austria continued to exert a strong influence well after Charles II had reached the age of majority. Madame D’Aulnoy complained mightily about how uncomfortable she was when she had to wear a guardainfante for an audience with the queen mother: “I had on a farthingale of dreadful bigness (for one must wear that in the Queen’s presence). I knew not what to do with myself with this strange invention; there’s no sitting down in it, and I believe if I should wear it all my life I should never be reconciled to it.”Footnote ¹³⁴ This requirement to wear the guardainfante at court extended to and included Queen Marie Louise of Orléans, whose distaste for Spanish fashions was well known, according to court gossip recorded by a Venetian ambassador.Footnote ¹³⁵ Between 1680 and 1683, a court guardainfantera (maker of guardainfantes) named María de la O handmade thirty-nine guardainfantes for the queen out of iron and bramante (twine); the documents do not specify what those guardainfantes looked like nor how large they were.Footnote ¹³⁶ The court guardainfantera had to petition for payments in arrears after paying the expenses of the materials herself: “on account of this labor I ask to be given a hundred ducados, for I find myself to be in extreme need.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Another guardainfantera, Dominga Leal, was on the payroll during the reign of Charles II’s second wife, the German María Ana of Neuburg (1667–1740; r. 1689–1700).Footnote ¹³⁸ Worn by Charles II’s two foreign, childless queens, these last guardainfantes projected an image of Spanishness and fertility that was as hollow as their iron hoops.

After Charles II died without an heir in 1700, the new French Bourbon dynasty that took over the Spanish throne retained the guardainfante during its transition to power as a show of respect to Spanish tradition. Spain’s new queen, the Italian-born María Luisa of Savoy (b. 1688; r. 1701–14), wore a guardainfante for her wedding to King Philip V (b. 1683; r. 1700–46), but shortly thereafter she discarded this relic of Spanish court etiquette. The Madrid court was given over fully to the French fashions that would continue to dominate Spanish trends for the rest of the eighteenth century.

The guardainfante’s exile was short-lived. The wide farthingale made a comeback at the end of the eighteenth century in a new form and with a new name: the tontillo. In Goya’s famous portrait of 1789 (fig. 13), Queen María Luisa of Parma (1751–1819; r. 1788–1808) wears a tontillo that closely resembles the guardainfantes worn by the Empress Margarita in the late 1660s and early 1670s (fig. 11). In a 1789 history of sumptuary legislation in Spain, the Spanish economist and historian Juan Sempere y Guariños complained that Philip IV’s 1639 ban had failed to eliminate the guardainfante, which was popular at court in his own time: “Far from having been corrected by that law, it emerged much more triumphant, surviving to this day, after more than a hundred and fifty years, in the ceremonial visits of the most honored ladies.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Sempere y Guariños gives the impression that the guardainfante was worn continuously from Philip IV’s era to his own, but in fact the hoopskirts worn at the Spanish court in the later eighteenth century had been introduced to Spain from France, and the Spanish tontillo was modeled after the French pannier.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Queen María Luisa of Parma and the rest of the ladies at the Spanish court may have been following French fashion, but their tontillos resonated with all the history and tradition of the seventeenth-century Spanish court.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Figure 13. The eighteenth-century tontillo. Francisco de Goya. Queen María Luisa of Parma, 1789. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Conclusion

The guardainfante’s meaning in Spanish society changed radically over the seventeenth century, but this item of women’s clothing was always a politically charged object that the Crown manipulated to further its agenda in domestic and international politics. In the 1630s, when the style first appeared, the wide-hipped farthingale triggered a hostile reaction in the streets, in the theaters, and on the printed page, among men who feared that women wearing guardainfantes were escaping male control and failing to fulfill their traditional gender roles. Those fears were expressed most often in the accusation that women were using the fashion to conceal scandalous pregnancies beneath their expanded skirts. When he issued a sumptuary law banning the guardainfante in 1639, King Philip IV quelled the disturbances and demonstrated his power to control women (by controlling their clothes). The guardainfante’s associations with pregnancy made it a useful tool for the Crown, which had a vested interest in displaying a fertile queen to its subjects and presenting princesses who promised to produce royal progeny to potential spouses abroad. Worn by royal women and girls performing official duties of state, this garment that technically was outlawed for all but prostitutes turned into an international symbol of Spain and Spanishness.

The guardainfante was much more than a prop for royal portraiture and ceremonies at the courts of Europe. At the height of its popularity in the 1650s–60s, the guardainfante was a widespread fashion worn by women in cities around the globe for everyday activities. Archival, literary, and visual evidence reveals that real women really did wear the guardainfante along with less luxurious versions of the clothes and accessories that were popular at court. A woman who wore a guardainfante had to be of some means, but she was not necessarily noble or affiliated with the court — “she is not a queen, but she is not a washerwoman either,” as Amalia Descalzo Lorenzo described Velázquez’s anonymous Lady with a Fan (fig. 5).Footnote ¹⁴² Nonroyal women of all ages and stages of life — unmarried, married, widowed; noble and not; from cities large and small — wore their guardainfantes while performing a diverse range of activities, from attending church to entering a syphilis hospital. Large numbers of women wearing guardainfantes contributed to the overall ostentation and splendor of a city, especially during festive occasions, and contributed to the spectacle of urban life.Footnote ¹⁴³ In a foreign city like Genoa, a woman wearing a guardainfante demonstrated her city’s allegiance to Spain (for the moment) by wearing this distinctively Spanish style.

Women wore the guardainfante despite the restrictions that it imposed on their bodily movements, and they suffered the harsh criticisms that were launched against their moral characters. The evidence suggests that women weighed the pros and cons of the guardainfante and made personal choices to wear it or not depending on the occasion. The critics exaggerated their claims about the ways that the guardainfante limited women’s movements, but the stiff hoops certainly could be an inconvenience; this is why María de Estrada Medinilla chose to leave her farthingale at home during the festivities celebrating the viceroy’s entry to Mexico City in 1640.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The seventeenth century was not an age of comfort in fashion, but there were limits to the inconveniences that a woman would tolerate, even if she was accustomed to a certain degree of discomfort in her daily dress.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

There were many reasons, personal and political, why a nonroyal woman might choose to wear the guardainfante. By wearing this stiff armature, a woman could transform her figure — whatever its natural shape — into the regal silhouette of the queen of Spain. In foreign cities like Genoa, a woman wearing a guardainfante visibly manifested her city’s allegiance to Spain. A woman might wear the guardainfante to please her husband, as María de la Encarnación claimed to do, or she might have worn it to attract attention to herself, as María de la Encarnación seems to have done. Her Inquisition trial highlights the social tensions that the guardainfante caused in the early years of the fashion and reveals the serious consequences that could come from wearing it; yet despite all the troubles that it caused her with her local clergy, neighbors, and the Inquisition, María de la Encarnación continued to wear her large guardainfante. While there were many different reasons why a woman might have worn a guardainfante, hiding a belly swollen with child does not appear to have been among them: there is no historical evidence to corroborate the long-standing assertion that women used guardainfantes to conceal illegitimate pregnancies. Claims that they did are pure fiction and polemic.

Writing in 1453 in Bologna, almost 200 years before the guardainfante fashion emerged in Madrid, the noblewoman Nicolosa Sanuti had argued that fashion was the only way that women were able to participate in public life. She thus defended women against sumptuary laws that would restrict them from dressing opulently: “Let not the rights of the humbler sex be snatched away by the injustice of the more powerful. State offices are not allowed to women, nor do they strive for priesthoods, triumphs, and the spoils of war, for these are the customary prizes of men. But ornaments and decorations, the tokens of our virtues — these, while the power is left us, we shall not allow to be stolen from us.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In seventeenth-century Spain, women still could not participate actively in the secular or ecclesiastical institutions of power. But they could and did participate in the politics of the Spanish empire through their contribution to the guardainfante fashion and the controversy that it engendered. Francisca Páez de Colindres and María de Ágreda boldly entered the debate over the guardainfante by writing strongly worded opinions addressed to the most powerful men of their times. Many more women left no written record of their opinions but nonetheless played a crucial role in making and disseminating the controversial guardainfante. By doing so, these women contributed to the political culture of seventeenth-century Spain in one of the only spheres of influence that was open to them, and that was in the realm of fashion.