A New Light On Suits Of Lights

Myth has it that the first suit of lights worn by a matador was designed by the great Spanish painter Goya—which is untrue, but then myths are judged by their social utility, not their objective veracity. What is true is that the bullfighting costume seen today is essentially unchanged since Goya's time.

The matador's jacket is a short, tapered affair of satin tabinet, layer upon layer of fabric sewn together and dipped in starch to produce a bodice of breastplate stiffness. The shoulders, back and sleeves are encrusted with enough gold embroidery, cording, tassels, decorations, miniature bees, frogs and flowerlike doohickeys to recall the most garish extravagances of a comic opera count. The matador's breeches cling like the skin of a sausage and are stitched with nearly as much ornamentation as is found on the jacket. The entire costume weighs upwards of 14 pounds.

Overall, the suit of lights is a study in functional uselessness, heavy and inflexible and with no redeeming protective qualities, such as a suit of armor has. The outfit is too thick for the searing afternoon midsummer heat of Spain, Mexico and Latin America, and too open to provide warmth in November or March. However, considerations of ease and function have always been irrelevant in bullfighting. Like a priest's ceremonial garb, the traje de luces is symbolic. It incarnates the past and inserts it into the present. Any change is jarring. It is said, for instance, that the coming of World War I had less impact on Madrid than the casual decision, one day in 1914, of the great matador Juan Belmonte to cut his coleta, or pigtail. "But Juan," the startled barber asked, "are you planning on retiring from the ring?" The rape of Belmonte's lock had so many imitators that eventually the tradition of the natural coleta was dropped altogether. But there are precious few examples of such tampering with tradition in bullfighting. One of the few is taking place now.

Two years ago a respected bullfight tailor, Madrid's Luis Alvarez, stated authoritatively, "There will be no changes in the traje de luces. Change must originate with the bullfighters themselves and their ideas. Perhaps in a hundred years there may be some differences. But slight. The traje is a thing of tradition."

In fact, even as Alvarez was making his proclamation, a revolution was beginning in the shop of his competitor, Fermin Lopez. As a tailor, Fermin shares the stature and success of Alvarez but not his subservience to the past. "I honor my ancient trade. I deeply respect the customs of bullfighting," Fermin says. "Tradition is fine and noble, but a lake that is not fed by springs eventually grows stagnant. We have known for a long time there are changes that could be made in the traje de luces, changes of construction and design to take advantage of new materials and new ideas without breaking completely with the traditions of the art."

As early as 1970 Fermin began to experiment in creating new types of cloth that would be lighter and more flexible than the centuries-old starched satin. Working closely with textile chemists, Fermin succeeded in developing an entirely new kind of "resinated cloth," a material that looks and feels like the tablecloth in an inexpensive restaurant.

First exhibited in April 1973, the new suits were up to 25% lighter than the old. Better, they could be dry-cleaned, whereas the conventional suits could not. A close pase por alto (when the bull brushes a matador's chest, leaving his blood streaked across the jacket) was great for generating applause, but it ruined the conventional traje for any further use. The layers of satin and starch absorbed the blood like pumice and no amount of dry-cleaning fluid could remove the stain, particularly if the suit was made of light colors. It then became usable by apprentice matadors and no one else. Furthermore, the conventional traje de luces holds up for no more than half a dozen corridas at best. Fermin's outfit can go 15 and beyond. The resinated cloth absorbs nothing. The blood simply dries and cakes on the exterior of the jacket and can be chipped or brushed off. One well-known matador has a sword handler hang his jacket on a clothesline and turn the garden hose on it.

Fermin's traje is priced slightly higher than a traditional model—$615 vs. $525—but considering the savings from extra wear, the new suits are actually about one-third as expensive as the old. For all but the top 10 or 12 matadors of Spain, this is a major consideration.

But money saving alone hardly would seduce the proud and rich handful of famous matadors for whom honor is everything and practicality contemptible. What struck them about Fermin's suits were the new designs he had incorporated, a bold rediscovery of classical simplicity.

The patterns were the creation of John Fulton, an American who is both a matador and a designer. "I see in them the purity and manliness of the classical world from which they are modeled," says Fulton. 'This is tradition in its finest sense, not rigid prejudice in favor of those encrusted baroque monstrosities we were obliged to wear until now." Fulton started toying with new ideas and patterns as far back as 1963, the year he became a matador in Seville. "I brought one of my new ideas to Manfredi, the most celebrated tailor of Seville," he recalls. "My intention was to replace the heavily embroidered epaulets, replete with rosettes and decorations, with a single piece of silk cloth woven with the same simple design I had chosen for the rest of the jacket."