earticle

영어

The changing of clothes in Balagtas’ 1860 fictional comedy La filipina elegante y negrito amante (The Elegant Filipina and the Amorous Negrito) is used to explore the ethnic, cultural, and sartorial diversity in 19th century colonial Philippines. But, how does plurality in men’s clothing reflect the socio-economic conditions of the late Spanish colonial period? This paper focuses on the diversity in Philippine men’s clothing around 1850 to 1896, taking into account the limited range of colonial archetypes in iconographic and documentary sources. Underscoring the colonial culture that shaped mentalities and tendencies, this study offers insights on how clothing was used and how it was perceived in relation to the wearer. In discussing clothing diversity, distinctiveness was articulated using the work of J.A.B. Wiselius (1875), a Dutch colonial administrator in neighboring Indonesia, who in comparing Spanish and Dutch systems of colonial governance, underscored the Filipino penchant for imitation.