Two countries, one peninsula
Iberia carries centuries stacked upon it: the Roman, the Visigoth, and above all seven hundred years of Arab presence which left, in the south, a taste for ornament and silk found nowhere else in Europe. Then the Atlantic and the sea did the rest.
As a result, the peninsula reads in two: an Atlantic North, that of Galicia and Portugal, soberer, turned towards wool, linen and spun gold; a Mediterranean, Andalusian South, that of the mantilla, the shawl and the flounced dress. Two climates, two temperaments, two ways of adorning oneself.
That North touches us closely. Portugal is an old textile country, and it is in Porto, in this Atlantic Iberia, that the Skadi balaclava is knitted. We will come back to it.
The Atlantic North and spun gold
Go up towards Galicia and the Portuguese Minho, and the costume changes tone. Less flamboyance, more wool and linen, an air of kinship with the Celtic lands across the way. But a splendour shines here all the same: gold filigree.
Around Viana do Castelo and Gondomar, near Porto, goldsmiths draw gold into threads fine as hair, then wind them into scrolls to compose hearts, crosses, pendants. The heart of Viana, that large pierced gold heart, is the emblem of a whole Portuguese north. A peasant woman on feast days wore several, the household's whole wealth on her chest.
It is that Iberia, hard-working and textile, that makes the Skadi balaclava today. A country where people still know how to spin, knit and weave well, far from the fast-fashion workshops. We did not choose it by chance.
The mantilla and the comb
Let us go down south, and it is the mantilla that reigns. A veil of black or white lace, set not flat but raised on a tall tortoiseshell comb, the peineta, which makes it fall in a cascade over the shoulders. A silhouette you confuse with no other.
It is worn to Mass, to the Holy Week processions, to the bullfights, to weddings. Black for mourning and married women, white for the great feasts. In the nineteenth century, when the fashion of Paris threatened to sweep all away, Queen Isabella II championed the mantilla as a national flag.
It is an elegance of cloth and shadow, where almost everything is played out in the transparency of the lace and the height of the comb. Nothing showy, and yet you see only her.
The Manila shawl
Over the shoulders, the Andalusian woman throws the mantón de Manila, a large silk shawl covered in embroidered flowers and finished with long hand-knotted fringes. Its name tells its journey: embroidered in China, it came by the Manila galleon all the way to Seville, at the other end of the Spanish world.
What was an exotic import became, in time, the most Andalusian of garments. It is worn knotted at the waist over the flounced dress, or draped over the shoulders, and the fringes dance at the slightest movement. The embroidery, dense, loaded with peonies and birds, keeps its Chinese origin without anyone thinking of it any more.
A fine lesson, by the way: a tradition is not always born on the spot. It can come from afar, settle, and become more local than the native. The Manila shawl is Chinese by birth and Andalusian by adoption.
The flounced dress and the feria
There is a Spanish costume that, instead of dying, became a living fashion: the flamenca dress. It is brought out each spring for the Feria of Seville, and, rarely, it changes every year, the length of the flounces, the colours, the polka dots. A regional costume that kept a couturier.
Its origin is humbler and more recent than people think. It is the working dresses of the gitanas, who accompanied their husbands to the Seville cattle fair in the nineteenth century, that the ladies ended up imitating. From a garment of the poor, the flounced dress rose to festive dress.
It stays alive for a simple reason: it is still really worn, and reworked every year. Many costumes sleep in the museum; the flamenca, for its part, kept a calendar, dressmakers and a dance floor.
The espadrille and honest material
Beneath all this, on the feet, one same shoe runs from one end of the peninsula to the other and as far as the neighbouring countries: the espadrille, the alpargata. A sole of braided plant fibre, hemp, jute or esparto, and a simple canvas upper, laced at the ankle.
It is the shoe of the poor and the peasant, light, cool, made of what grows at the edge of the field. Nothing plastic, nothing synthetic, just fibre and canvas. It ended up conquering the whole world without losing anything of its original simplicity.
The alpargata sums up rather well what we look for: a good natural material, a clear use, no excess. From the gold filigree of Viana to this rope sole, Iberia knows how to make precious as it knows how to make right. And it is there, in that same demand, that Skadi belongs.
