Abstract

This public lecture introduces Philippine sartorial history by providing a colorful, visual overview of the clothing of men and women of varying ages, political positions, and occupations in nineteenth century Spanish Philippines. It seeks to answer how clothing can be used to gain insights on a wide range of colonial issues. Research methods, sources and perspectives of analysis will be presented to show how clothes were used as tools for social, cultural and economic history. “Reading” clothes draws from, among others, Daniel Roche´s study of seventeenth- and eighteenth- French culture of appearances, Roland Barthes´s language of fashion, and Ulf Hannerz´s cosmopolitanism.

Dr. Stephanie Marie Coo is the award-winning author of Clothing the Colony: Nineteenth-century Philippine Sartorial Culture, 1820-1896 (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2019), which recently received Leiden University´s IIAS-ICAS International Book Prize 2021 as the Best Book in Humanities- English Language Edition. Currently, she is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow (EU Horizon2020-Athenea3i) at the Universidad de Granada (Spain) and NOVA School of Law-Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal). She obtained her PhD in History (très honorable avec félicitations) from Université Nice Sophia Antipolis (France), Master of Arts in History and Bachelor of Science in Management from the Ateneo de Manila University (Philippines). She holds an Assistant Professorship at the Department of History of the Ateneo de Manila University, where she served as Chair of the Internationalization Committee and Coordinator for Internationalization between 2018 and 2019. [Email: scoo@ateneo.edu]