“This Is the Spanish Taste”: Spanish Fashion in the French Colonial Imaginary

In a 1712 memorandum dispatched from French Louisiana, the top colonial official complained at length about women in the colony being ruined by their taste for luxury apparel goods--specifically their consumption of “Spanish” goods. Conversely, the lucrative Spanish colonial market attracted French and colonial outfitters and merchants who used Louisiana as a stepping off point for illicit trade with Spanish colonial ports. The importance of the Spanish trade to Louisiana’s economy was such that in 1748, Governor Vaudreuil would complain that merchants shipped “merchandise aimed at the Spaniard” in disproportionate quantities, shortchanging the needs of Louisiana’s own colonists.

Underscoring all of these declarations was a certainty about what constituted Spanish consumer taste. Indeed, a merchant’s letter dating to 1742 described in detail the type of goods considered suitable for the export trade with Spanish colonies, and he concluded his list with the smug declaration: “That is the Spanish taste.” This merchant, just like the author of the 1712 memorandum and Governor Vaudreuil, felt that it was possible to draw a clear distinction between the Spanish and the French taste. Yet closely examining his list of goods in the Spanish taste (alongside lading bills and other evidence) shows that while some of the goods he identified were particular to Spanish fashion--such as black taffeta mantillas--most of the articles listed were commonly found in probate inventories or merchants’ records in French Louisiana. That there was little or no marked difference between these different consumers prompts the question of whether and how the very idea of Spain operated as a foil in the French imaginary and of how ultimately, the construction of distinct Atlantic worlds relied on notions of fashion and “taste.”