The leopard skin trajectory
When they got to Madrid the centre was already occupied. They started
settling to the south of the city: in Parla, Fuenlabrada, Leganés or Getafe.
They came from Andalusia and Extremadura. They changed the village
for the neighbourhood. They came to work and they became the working
class. This was nearly fifty years ago.
Today their grandchildren live in these dormitory cities in the south,
where a sense of village and neighbourhood life coexist. They have
inherited a number of things from the early settlers: they are still working
class and still have a strong fighting spirit or pride, as this is where the
village outlook meets leopard skin.
What’s the difference two generations on between the way a girl from
Parla looks today and another from central Madrid? The canons of
beauty in the capital are defined from the top of the media pyramid: you
only have to look at advertising and fashion magazines to discover why
people wear what they do each season. Neighbourhood aesthetics, in
contrast, cannot be found in glossy magazines, practitioners drink at the
source, drawn their inspiration from what their immediate environment.
This is the essential difference: in an era of mass culture, ideals of
neighbourhood beauty are still passed down from mothers to daughters.
You won’t find these styles advertised, they are made up of products sold
at local markets that don’t feature on the pages of fashion magazines.
And, unlike the fashion industry, they do not seek to create a culture in
order to sell it as they feed into a culture.
Neighbourhood aesthetics comprise memes or signs of identity that are
copied automatically from generation to generation. Hence we can trace
with ease the genealogy of the leopard skin look. Leopard skin is a time-
honoured reference from the nobility. It probably reached these shores
courtesy of the British colonists who borrowed it from the ancient
African kings and as years passed it was gradually adopted as a status
symbol by Andulusian housewives; wearing an ostentatious profusion of
ringed bracelets, gold rings and earrings, all proof of a gypsy heritage. Or
wearing the omnipresent Catholic Virgin Medal or the Caravaca cross
that her great-grandmother wore during the Civil War. Or with dyed
blonde hair reminiscent of Swedish tourists from the 60s, or with
fabulous, heavy makeup.
Neighbourhood aesthetics are about ostentation and pride. It’s no good
being shy and retiring in the neighbourhood, you have to show off what
you’ve got. Girls use the same strategies their mothers did to make
themselves look good and their Playboy tattoos are a reflection of the
daring bust lines they were nurtured on. Attitude; neighbourhood
women are forces to be reckoned with. Despite the highly coherent
updating process consisting of piercings and aesthetic innovations from
Japan, the look they adopt remains a respectful evolution of the culture
of their forebears. So unlike a twenty-year old goth, hip-hop fan or post-
punk follower, a pokera from the neighbourhood never looks out of place
in the family photo and her mother is unlikely to tell her off about the
way she looks. Modernity and respect Messenger, leopard skin and
Camarón.