[MR] book on Spanish costuming

[SNSpies at aol.com]

The IBSN  is 0875351263 . Amazon currently has new copies (re-printed) for 
$29 (no, I  have no association with Amazon, other then giving them a sizable 
chunk of my  paycheck every month :-) ). My mother has the original printing, 
and I have  the re-print, and I can't tell the difference between the two, 
despite the  more then ten-year gap between issues.

_Hispanic Costume: 1480 - 1530_  by Ruth M. Anderson only covers Spanish and 
Portuguese fashion (as the title  may suggest). It's roughly split in half -- 
one half covering male dress and  the other half covering female dress. Within 
each gender there is a long  section on "occassions for men/women to wear 
fancy dress" -- this is mostly  from a royal perspective, as the royal wardrobe 
accounts are some of the main  written sources Anderson uses. The other half of 
the section covers all the  different garments being worn, from hair and 
headdress, shoes, hose,  shirts/shifts/chemises (I forget the Spanish term 
Anderson uses for these) to  the main garment, outer garments and jewelry. Most of 
the pictures in the book  are black-and-white, however what I find most 
wonderful about the organization  -- for each section on hair, shoes, shifts, etc. 
Anderson has detail-pictures  from many different paintings/sculpture/prints. So, 
for women's chemises, she  has ~12 different close-ups of how the chemise 
band works and of embellishment  on the chemise, so you can see the range of 
variations. The close-up shots  only show the garment being discussed -- so it 
will cut off the figure's face  if it's showing the chemise and only show the 
feet if the stockings are what  is being discussed. In my opinion doing this sort 
of selective cropping of the  art allows you to see much more detail then if 
you only had a full-page print  of the entire painting. (It also makes the 
text easier to follow, as the  close-up pictures are almost always on the same 
page as the text that refers  to them). All of the close-up pictures have dates 
and attributions, so you  know what painting it comes from.