“With the fashion of the covered, women could lead a free life without anyone knowing.” It is told by Juan de la Cruz, member of the Insular Sectorial Council of Traditional Clothing of Tenerife. He is the curator of the exhibition Tapadas, which will remain until May 11 – from Monday to Saturday, from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., and on Sundays and holidays, from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. – at the Museo of History and Anthropology (MHA), located in the Casa Lercaro de La Laguna. The term covered refers to those women who, to go out, covered their bodies and part of their faces with different garments, exposing both eyes… or just one. And the island girls were also covered.
For some historians, this fashion was introduced to the Peninsula by the eastern peoples between the 4th and 5th centuries. While for others, it came from the Arabs from the 15th century. From the colonization of the Islands by the Castilians at the end of the fifteenth century, almost all the towns of the Archipelago had women who used the traditional covered costumes. This female custom of hiding the body and face under clothing was a tradition closer to the East than to the West, which is why it attracted so much attention. They were known as half-eye covers, sheltered or covered. It lasted until the middle of the 19th century in the Canary Islands.
Canarian women turned this imposition on its head and created codes to relate
What today attracts so much attention –and generates rejection– in Western societies when they see how women cover their entire bodies –or part of them– in some Muslim countries –the most extreme ones, such as Afghanistan, with the burqa–, centuries was also prevalent in those same Western societies. And the Canary Islands were not an exception. You just need to walk through this exhibition to see it.
This type of clothing began to be used to go to church, but little by little its use spread among women. Symbol of oppression in extremely macho societies, these canons were protected by costumbrismo, in a time marked by social, moral, religious and aesthetic codes very different from the current ones. Society imposed norms and restrictions that were expressed in the bodies. «This exhibition on Las Tapadas in the Canary Islands allows us to understand how, until the 19th century, the tradition of imposing on women the use of the mantle and saya to cover the face and observe the world with only one eye was related to the ways of disciplining the female body. But at the same time, she invites herself to think about how clothing can be used as part of an experience of emancipation », points out the information on the Casa Lercaro exhibition.
And it is that many women turned it around, as Carmen Barreto, professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of La Laguna, explains. «This perspective of the clothing of the covered as oppression, is complemented by the experience of resistance and self-realization of women since the sixteenth century. Canarian women also saw in the clothing that covered them an opportunity to build, through body and visual language, their way of understanding the relationships between privacy, friendship, affections, desires and space. They instrumentalized clothing to participate in both social and religious life, and thus build networks and connections between them.
The excesses that favored the covered they soon generated other vetoes with fines of different amounts. From the 16th century to the 18th century, the monarchs of the Spanish crown tried to repeal these prohibitions, but no attempt was successful. This was the case with Felipe II, Felipe III, Felipe IV, Carlos II and Carlos III. The tapado ended up disappearing from Spanish cities due to social transformations, but in towns in the Canary Islands and the Peninsula they continued to be used until the mid-19th century.
The importance of the covered went beyond fashion, since in the classic Spanish literature different mentions have been made of this way of dressing. They are named in works such as Las bizarrías de Belisa, by Lope de Vega; The jealous of herself or The medical love, by Tirso de Molina; or in The Hidden and the Covered, by Calderón de la Barca.
Experts believe that this fashion came to Spain from the East in the 14th century or from the 15th
The exhibition of the Museum of History and Anthropology of La Laguna is based on garments that covered the women of the time such as the mantilla, the mantle or the fans. The exhibition is made up of different mannequins with the typical Canarian clothes of the time. Concepción Rivero, councilor of the Cabildo Museums, invites the population to get to know this fashion that “moves between two waters, solemnity and respect and mischief.” Dulce Rodríguez de la Rosa, a member of the sectoral council for traditional clothing in Tenerife, comments that the oldest pieces are in display cases. These are fountains from the museum itself. The rest of the exhibition is made up of reproductions and the occasional old piece from the private collections of the exhibition’s curators.
