Combining cultural history, literary analysis, and studies in economics, material life and gender, Rebecca Haidt shows how clothing and display penetrated all corners of eighteenth-century Spanish society, and reveals the ambivalence of women who wore, traded, mended, bartered, sold, stole or created garments that came to mark their status in society. Focussing on sainetes and tonadillas (popular short plays and musical sketches) the author examines the representation of a culture where ‘fashion’ was impossible to separate from issues of labor, commerce, and productivity. These...