What Spaniards wear
Why the social spontaneity of Spaniards is reflected in the "correct" clothes they wear.
These are a few acts you will rarely catch Spaniards committing:
Being drunk during the day.
Using severe sunburn to exfoliate.
Leaving the house without a coat in the morning. (Any slight morning chill trumps the inconvenience of being straddled with an extra layer in 35-degree heat nine hours later)
Wearing shorts during any month not called August.
Driving calmly in the rain.
Throwing on a confused mismatch of sports clothing and loungewear when running out for errands.
Spain is made for people watching. With its dense and diverse barrios (neighbourhoods), observing people is easy. They’re everywhere.
Adept at Jenga-like living, Spaniards like being around each other, and they like to be seen. With bars and plazas and cafés on doorsteps, socialising isn’t just a weekend thing – proximity makes it an everyday thing. With people in the barrio always on the go, dipping in and out of meeting places, Spaniards drift seamlessly between work and play.
Small-apartment living and good weather push people to live large chunks of their long days outside of the home. Spaniards convene at the barras and terrazas for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or to tomar algo (sitting down for anything from a café con leche to a gin and tonic) at any time in between. People are the décor of daily life in Spain and they dress for the part.
While the family home is a private and sacred place, everything else is fair game. “The street – la calle – is far more than just a stretch of tarmac and paving stones,” wrote Giles Tremlett in Ghosts of Spain. “It is neutral ground, a space to meet and, why not, to show off.”
Spaniards care about the perceptions of others – just ask any foreign correspondent. For even the most mundane sort of interaction with the outside world, therefore, appearances come before comfort and convenience.
The low-brow layer of the Spanish media obsesses over the outfits of female politicians like Yolanda Díaz, cynically highlighting a woman that is both well-dressed and a self-professed communist, trusting that the social media algorithms will do the rest. Insults based on looks, again towards women like Díaz, are not uncommon.
“When I lived in London,” a Galician friend recently told me, “one of the first things I noticed about what people wore were the extremes. There seemed to be no halfway point: you would either see people in suits or else wearing something close to pyjamas in supermarkets.”
She was also puzzled by the absence of photographs on CVs, something which is a given for anyone applying for a job in Spain. During her time at an up-market home design company, a role which involved daily face time with the public, she worked alongside a guy with dreadlocks, piercings, and tattoos. “In Spain, that would be unthinkable.”
Rather than being judged on his academic and professional merits, the dreads would have seen the curriculum torn to shreds.
“One morning, as I was about to take our Leila, then seven, she scrutinised me critically and observed: ‘You’re not dressed.’ She was wrong. I looked adorable in my sneakers, short and Barcelona football shirt.”
Impossible City, Paris in the Twenty-First Century, Simon Kuper
Here in Galicia, there’s no point dressing for the streets of Catalonia.
The inclement weather that storms in and out in tantrums makes umbrellas redundant. Not much use for tops and trousers in the dreamy cream tones of the Mediterranean when you’re one badly-timed downpour in no man’s land (the middle of any plaza) away from being transparentised.
In a corner of Spain with more than 70 words to describe the water that falls from the sky, there’s a functionality to the fashion. A climate-conditioned closet conservatism. People want to stay warm and dry when walking into harassing headwinds and harsh rain, but that doesn’t mean they can’t look good.
“There isn’t a strong concept here of ‘dressing up,’” wrote Simon Kuper in Impossible City, Paris in the Twenty-First Century. “Rather in any situation – whether a night out or dropping your kids at school – you should look elegant, or at least ‘correct’, meaning that it’s never OK to queue at the baker’s in sweaty jogging gear. Sports clothing here is considered here a marker of the banlieues - in other words, of barbarism.”
When it comes to clothing etiquette, Spaniards are nothing like the proudly pretentious Parisians, but there are parallels with the idea of dressing correctly.
As I write this, a man with a black leather folder tucked under his arm is standing outside the café. Wearing a blue Scalpers shirt, navy chinos, and brown boat shoes, he could be waiting to catch up with a friend or preparing to sign a business deal over a cortado in bar - perhaps it’s both. In Spain, a country where the working day drags on too long, the lines between business and pleasure blur like a lava lamp.
The convenience built into socialising in Spain makes it a low-effort ritual. It’s why the “living for the weekend” mindset doesn’t exist, and why the perennially semi-formal look of the average Spaniard makes it difficult to tell the day of the week by their clothes. Dressing correctly daily, they resist wardrobe categories such as weekday wear and weekend wear. It’s why Spaniards are the great social improvisers - Sunday afternoon or Monday morning, they are always ready and dressed to tomar algo. Very little effort - the enemy of spontaneity - is needed.
In societies that are slaves to urban sprawl-imposed schedules, socialising is off limits for most of the week. Parents see colleagues during the day and children in the evening. On an exceptional day they may even interact with a card machine and pair of hands at the drive-through.
Jumping from bed to desk to car to couch and from formal uniforms to Netflix clothes Monday to Friday, the inhabitants of disconnected communities then lurch to the other extreme at weekends: getting dressed up for brunch or dinner, trying (and failing) to squeeze all their social needs into a window of about 36 hours.
And then it’s Monday again.
While dense urban living in Spain encourages people to dress up and get out frequently, Spain’s rise in the fashion world has been propelled from Galicia.
The Inditex effect
During the morning school run, A Coruña’s caffeine-fuelled parents make it known that, despite 3 hours of broken sleep and a torrid morning trying to put clothes onto flailing limbs, they still had the presence of mind to look at myself in the mirror before leaving the house.
It may only be the addition of a skull-cap or patterned socks intentionally exposed above shiny silver New Balance sneakers, but there’s always a detalle.
The birthplace of Inditex, A Coruña is ground zero of Spain’s fashion industry. Referred to by The Financial Times as “a colossus among retailers,” the group - headquartered in the nearby town of Arteixo - is comprised of seven brands including Bershka, Stradivarius, Pull and Bear, Massimo Dutti, and by far the biggest, Zara.
The Inditex effect on the city is undeniable. “Name for me one Spanish city that dresses better than A Coruña. (It doesn’t exist),” declared one proud local online while sharing a viral TikTok video that paid homage to the fashion sense of locals.
Last week, after breakfast and people-watching in the affluent Ensanche area, a snack-sized Soho, I visited the nearby Zara store that locals have described to me as the cuna de la moda española, the home of Spanish fashion.
Purgatory is spending a Saturday afternoon in Primark on Madrid’s Gran Vía. Here in Zara, however, the vast space and minimalist approach to stock presentation make this feel nothing like fast fashion - everything about this pilot store, bar the prices, exudes luxury.
Inditex founder (and one of the wealthiest men in the world) Amancio Ortega set up the first Zara store in A Coruña in 1975. Here, locals still get first dibs a month ahead of the rest on new lines that are put to the acid test. If a shirt or dress isn’t a hit with the Atlantic cosmopolitan Coruñeses, it won’t hit the shelves anywhere else.
Walls are sparsely occupied by French photography books, Louis Vitton guides to London, Rome, and New York, and copies of The World According to Karl (Lagerfeld). The top floor, meanwhile, has sea views on one end and a boutique café at the other. In the middle, the vinyl edition of Taylor Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department, is on display, discreetly blending in with the pleasant pastel tones of chairs and coffee tables and an absurdly inviting sofa. Fresh sunflowers and tulips are also on sale. If Lonely Planet ever get around to a Galicia guide in English, this Zara’s flagship store should feature for the views and good coffee (sampled out of journalistic duty) alone.
Zara is good at selling the perception of luxury at an affordable price. In the attention economy, perception is the currency. At a time when everything is moving online, in 2023 Zara celebrated an 11% increase in physical store sales compared to 2019. Inditex’s strategy has been underpinned by swapping quantity for quality and prestige: fewer stores, bigger spaces, more strategic locations.
There are, for example, flagship stores for both Zara and Massimo Dutti along the Champs Elysées in Paris.
The likes of Selena Gomez, Spain’s Queen Letizia, and Kate Middleton wearing Zara stuff can’t hurt as it distances itself from fast fashion’s race to the bottom, looking instead to the French and Italian brands at the top.
That said, there’s nothing slow or status quo about Inditex. Of all the companies on the IBEX 35, Spain's principal stock exchange, Inditex has the youngest workforce, with 57% of its staff under the age of 30 (the IBEX 35 average is 23%). Only 16% of the company is over the age of 50. The CEO of Spain’s most valuable company, Marti Ortega, was born in 1984.
Inditex’s ability to be fast at fashion contrasts dramatically with a curious element of the elite echelon of Madrid. A group so timeless that the clothes its members wear defy time and transverse generations.
Misma ropa (Same clothes)
Madrid is getting bigger and busier, more international and more expensive. The wider Madrid region has added about 1.6 million people since the turn of the millennium - a little over one in every six in the city are foreigners.
Bakeries and speciality coffee shops and tourist apartments are devouring panaderías and old-school bars and the homes of their locals.
One cohort, however, shows that with enough wealth it’s possible to resist the change that pushes and pulls everyone else: the pijos madrileños, the posh and snooty sliver of Madrid society that wine and dine, socialise and shop in the city’s most exclusive zones.
There are snobs all over Spain but, as observed by Enrique Alpañés in a recent El Pais newsletter, the Madrid blend of pijo (“pee-ho”) is unique.
Here he recounts an afternoon of pijo-watching from a café in their natural habitat: Madrid’s Salamanca neighbourhood:
“I soon noticed a father strolling leisurely (no one seems to be in a hurry in this neighbourhood) with his teenage son. They were like photocopies, not so much genetically as aesthetically. They were dressed in a formal, vaguely country manner: the kind of clothes that could be used for a casual friday at the consulting firm or a Sunday hunting trip in the mountains. They were, indeed, pijos.
All cities have pijos, but they are especially striking in Madrid, where many wealthy neighbourhoods are more like watertight compartments - alien to outside influences - where pijo has become the aspiration, a trait to be proud of, exaggerated to the point of caricature. In Madrid, pijos don’t pretend to be bohemian, nor do they disguise themselves as hipsters like in Barcelona. They don't mix or contaminate themselves with other influences as happens in medium-sized cities like San Sebastián or Valencia. Here there are even more moccasins, more red-and-blue polo shirts, more quilted vests.
Another trait of pijerío that interests me is the total absence of rebelliousness in its genesis. Most teenagers end up choosing their aesthetics in opposition to the system or to their parents, which at that age are the same thing. But with this lot that doesn’t happen: one doesn’t become a pijo by rebellion, but by inheritance. And it surprises me that a teenager, instead of rebelling against the world, believes that the best way to fit into it is to disguise himself as an entrepreneur or divorcee. The clothes he chooses at that age won’t change with the times or fashion. He’ll buy the same garment over and over again throughout his life, as if he were one of The Smurfs or Mickey freakin’ Mouse…Male pijos reach levels of homogenisation typical of the army or private schools (there may be a pattern there). More than dressed, they go about in uniforms.”
Las Ventas, Madrid’s bullring, is another prime pijo point to see youngish men (known also as Cayetanos) wearing Ganso shirts, beige chinos, Spanish flag bracelets, and the same density-first hairstyles worn by public figures such as footballer Álvaro Odriozola (pictured below) and F1 driver Carlos Sainz Jr.
This small cluster in the parched centre of Spain have the fantastical idea that they are the real Spain, but they are oblivious to how increasingly multi-cultural their country is becoming.
For them, the invisible working-class foreigners are often only visible when serving wine in restaurants or cleaning their homes.
The rest of us, who pile into diverse barrios, can see Spain is changing. Fashion here will change too. There will be new influences from Latin America and north Africa in particular, influences that should be embraced.
I can think of one brand, at least, who will be fast enough not to miss the opportunity.
Until next time amigos,
Brendan