Traditional costume room

The Museum's traditional costume collection is one of its treasures and a clear benchmark resource for scholars of the subject. Both the clothes and their accompanying accessories date mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries and were collected prior to 1925. That year saw the opening of the Regional and Historical Costume Exhibition, a milestone in Spanish cultural life held in Madrid at the Palace of Libraries. After a long and winding history, the Museo del Pueblo Español (Museum of the Spanish People) - the direct predecessor of the Museo del Traje (The Costume Museum) - was founded in 1934. It featured the majority of the collections displayed at that exhibition along with many others gathered later.

This area offers visitors an exhibition consisting of more than forty complete traditional costumes and a small selection of objects from everyday life. The festive costumes stand out, along with some everyday or working forms of dress and three masked dancers' costumes. The objects, which allude to the context in which these clothes were worn, include musical instruments, spinning and weaving tools, beekeeping instruments, furniture, pastoral art and traditional games. All these pieces are grouped into five sections entitled Evolutions, Ritual festivals, Professional identity, Survival and identity and Exaltation of the wealth.

• Evolutions: although very few of the changes experienced by these forms of dress were structural, they have endowed many of them with a certain eclecticism.
• Ritual festivals: associated with the festive calendar, there is a specific and unique costume tailored to each celebration. Some festivals follow the agricultural calendar or the Catholic saints' calendar, while others are medieval (the sacraments, Christmas, Carnival and Corpus Christi, the latter of which features a permanent duality between good and evil). Others have a historical origin (Moors and Christians or soldierly garb), and many entail a certain suspension of normal morality, with dancers as protagonists.
• Professional identity: these specific trade-associated costumes comprise garments and accessories perfectly tailored to each profession by their nature or material. These are conditioned by the climate, the terrain and the available materials.
• Survivals and identities: traditional costumes and jewellery co-exist in different silhouettes and garments from different timelines and artistic influences, from the medieval period to Art Deco. Hand-weaving coincided with industrial weaving, hand sewing with its mechanical counterpart, and natural dyes with chemical dyes.
• Exaltation of the wealth: the most luxurious costumes are those worn during ceremonies and local festivals. They are associated with rites of passage and the life cycle: birth, marriage and death. They are made up of abundant, multi-layered pieces, whose richness derives from the quality of the textiles, ornaments, footwear and, above all, jewellery.