The lizard suit: an artisanal luxury and a historical enigma

On Thursday, April 8, Pilar Iglesias and Hortensia Moreno got up at seven in the morning to have time to put on their lizard dress, a magnificent set composed of endless pieces, and be ready for the photographic session of the ten in the cloister of the Church of the Savior, because those of the magazine came; As in 1858, the Welsh photographer Charles Clifford accompanied by the Duke of Frías, who told him that in his life he was going to see the same thing; And that in 1912 Joaquín Sorolla came to paint, and to photograph them just a century José Ortiz Echagüe and only a year ago the Peruvian Mario Testino, and always, they or their mothers or grandmothers or great -grandmothers, the women and also the men of the town of the people In Lagarte (Toledo), they have taken the time to place their atavistic clothes, inherited from generation to generation, to pose with everything in its exact place - the shirt, the enagu socks, the bodybuilding, the apron, the chip, the bug and what I know - before his stunned gaze.

Pilar Iglesias, 74, helped her dress her two sisters, and as they were putting parties, she reminded Grandma Quisca that they dropped their tears, and she told them not to cry, that she had to be happy.Hortensia Moreno (from 56) was helped her sister -in -law and a neighbor of her.Moreno felt the usual: as if her grandmother Maria de her got into her and possessed her.Maria wore a lifetime all her life.She died in 1982. She said one day: "I don't feel like sewing today," and two days later she died.The last Lagarteran who dressed every day of the Lagarteran was Aunt FelipSoldiers, ignorant of the wonder they had, whistled from women and made them embarrassed from their appearance.

Until then, all in a lizard, they formidable and they with their most sober clothes, about 2,500 at that time, 1,000 more than today, they dressed as they had dressed there for centuries, with a unique uniqueness that a good taste authority defines how “theManufacturing brought to the maximum of excellence, in an insurmountable harmony of patterns and chromatic information. ”This authority is Tomás Alía, 57, a renowned interior designer, born in the lizard and son of the teacher Labandera Pepita Alía, who at 90 has passed the relief of the cause to Tomás after decades promoting the heritage of his people, toSuch a level that the ring of Pablo VI dressed as a lizard, and that Queen Juliana de Holland came to the Vatican, and that Queen of the Netherlands made the guard form in the garden of her palace so that Pepita entered with honors with the tablecloths that herHe had embroidered.

Tomás Alía is a professional with an agenda of saturated projects - luxury boots, single -family housing, offices - but perhaps what he occupies the most space in his vertiginous head - he thinks very fast and speaks even faster than he thinks - be what what He qualifies as his mother's "great stony", the obsession with safeguarding the rich legacy of his people. Its purpose is that these clothes are declared Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO - as happened in 2019 with the ceramics of Talavera, of which it is an ambassador - and that this facilitates its protection and opens the eyes to the current potential of its old techniques of elaboration. Alía's greatest dream is that in Spain a University of Decorative Arts is based on which students can learn from artisanal knowledge that is barely preserved throughout the country and modernize it. He considers it a strategic need: “We must define well what the famous Spain brand is. The Spain brand is not the paella, nor the chotis, nor the Sanfermines, please, but the best of our crafts, what is done by hand, which is the real luxury, the luxury well understood, and with more reason in this globalized world which demands originality and sustainability. ” Alía regrets that there is no state project in this regard and points out that now it would be the ideal time to undertake it, because the European Commission has just launched the new European Bauhaus, an innovation plan that connects green economy and style.

Crapped with a modern sucks on whose back "there is no planet B", the designer passes in a tris of speech to the delight, bows his head towards Pilar Iglesias's chest with thorough eyes and carefully stroking him the buglera exclaims: “Daughter, is that what you wear here is the biggest!The fabrics! ”La Gorguera is like a peto that is almost open ahead and the tissue is a point of point that consists of working a fabric to make a rectilinear drawing with enhancement.Alía adds: “Eye to work.Lagarteranas are not embroiderers, they are workshops.The common and current embroiderer follows a pencil -made drawing, which is very easy, while the work is what it does is work on the plot and the warp of a fabric, as if the earth is standing, and creating reliefs following memory patterns.They form mathematically topographies. ”

Pilar Iglesias is amazed that their ancestors, who could not go to school, were such good geometers. “My grandmother went to Barcelona to sell tablecloths without knowing how to read or write. I was dressed as a lizard and when it was lost, I asked: 'Excuse me, where am I? stately tone]: 'You are in the Rambla de Cataluña. ” The lizards began to market their work at the beginning of the 20th century, applying their virtuosity to home clothes such as tablecloths, bedding or towels. Today in the town there are still embroidery businesses and most women know how to work, although few control the most complex and distinctive techniques, whose domain requires a monacal amount of time, patience and concentration. Hortensia Moreno says, for example, that her daughters sew well, "because they take him in the blood", but cannot be expected to live it like her, that without going any further he has been doing a quilt for 10 years. Ten years. A quilt. But, what is 10 years for a woman who received us with red risks of a century of seniority dyed with piglets and a cement bug of more than two centuries ago.

The Ceazo - the Gartera has its own dictionary - is a typical spiral figure of its costumes and that, according to Alía, belongs to the sefardí semiotics.

The origin of the peculiar lizard culture and its clothes is still open. The late local historian Julián García Sánchez wrote that the people could found him in the Medievo Mozarabes exiled from Andalusia for Muslim pressure and that, in defense of his Catholic faith, they locked themselves "in a circle of hostile indigenism." What Tomás Alía maintains, on the contrary, is that a lizard must have founded at that time from an original neighborhood called Toledillo, formed by Jews from Toledo, and that what has survived so far, half a millennium after the forced conversions and of the expulsion edict of the Catholic Monarchs, what we saw in the spectacular attire of Hortensia, Pilar and the dozen older and young neighbors who gathered in the Church, and also in the pride with which they carried them, from the From seventy -so many to twenty -year -old, it is the sedse of the Sephardic essence. “What is in this town is not folklore. This is an open anthropology book. It is the result of a culture committed to defending and preserving its patterns, although religious origin has been erased completely, ”says Alía with conviction.

The designer is a relationship of the main indications that would support his hypothesis and begins with the Gorgueras of the women of the Mellah (Jewish) of northern Morocco, with the same cement, symbols of infinity, of the Lagarteran Gorgueras.He talks about the hanging beds before in some homes of the town, and of those that retain one in his house in Lagarte, which were used only for weddings, adorned with profusion and covered by a canopy, and that links with the jupa,The Jewish Palio.He also mentions the Cantarera, a common niche in the lizard homes that could have to do with the spaces where the Torah would have been placed.And in his house, Pepita Alía's home shows the extreme abigarming of Catholic religious imagery;He says that since ancient times it was an accentuated feature of the rooms of the lizard families and deduces that it perhaps responded to the overact of the convert.

Concha Herranz, conservative of the Museum of the suit, agrees that the circular figures in Las Gorgueras are a Jewish hall of identity and considers that those of the lizard clothes can have that root, beyond the fact that there is in the suit, as inAll traditional Spanish costumes, a variety of influences."They are the result of our history," she says, "and ours is a story of mixtures."

The truth is that, whether or not a masterful inheritance crypto, the lizard clothing, an icon of Spanish culture, has arrived until today in a formidable state of conservation, and this has been possible because of the unusual heat that this community has put inThe care of their heritage, which also participate in the 21st century lizards.Only an English exam prevented Dori Ropero's 13 -year -old daughter could dress and go to the photo shoot, in which there were two twenty -year -olds, Natalia Marín and Estela Corrochán, listening to Alía's explanations and ladies without saying or sayPío, or the thirties Alfonso Fernández, who by order of Don Tomás had to shave a 10 -year beard to be as he had to be.

He did it without major problem, because Alfonso Fernández, a man of sweet and serene tone, loves to dress as a lizard.He carried the classic elements of the male clothing: chamarreta, nightgown, sayo, girdle, underwear, shoes, hat, all gathered by him, because the fact is that he was born in a humble house and his family barely had pieces.Next to his lived a labrandera, Emiliana, and as a child he passed by every day and was bewitched looking from the door the colors of those clothes, the brightness of the sequins.Over time he already entered and spent hours seeing her work, and Mrs. Emiliana was explaining the why, the keys to this ancient and enigmatic plot of words and threads.At age 12, his passion was so great that he spent the inheritance left by a grandmother, 600 euros, in a nineteenth -century Lagartean boyfriend.She keeps it as a treasure, wrapped in cotton cloths.