ABSTRACT
Writing in a 1971 issue of Cortty, the El Corte Ingles department store's employee bulletin, journalist Vicente Verdu marveled at how changes in Spain's consumer culture had transformed Spanish gender relations during the 1960s. he repressive early years of Generalissimo Francisco Franco's brutal dictatorship, had seen the Franco regime and its ally, the Spanish Catholic Church, impose a rigid gender hierarchy that mandated separation of the sexes in public areas from the age of 6, disenfranchised and stripped women of the right to work, and stressed female obedience to male authority. But by the late 1960s, Verdu wrote, new "youth" sections at Spain's department stores had undermined this gender order. These departments traded especially in unisex fashions influenced by counter-cultural movements then sweeping through the United States and Western Europe; by offering boys and girls the same clothes in the same place, they became spaces where Spanish adolescents could mingle freely over clothes that emphasized equality, not gender difference.
