About La Moda

La Moda

La Moda was a literary magazine founded in Buenos Aires in 1837 by Juan Bautista Alberdi, the young lawyer and thinker who later became the principal intellectual author of the Argentine Constitution. It was published in Buenos Aires between 18 November 1837 and 21 April 1838, running to twenty-three issues before it was forced to close. Despite its title, which meant The Fashion, and its presentation as a women's magazine, La Moda was the vehicle of the Generation of 1837, the circle of liberal intellectuals gathered around the Salón Literario, or Literary Hall. Through articles on fashion, music, literature and manners, it introduced European artistic tendencies such as Romanticism, and political liberalism, to an Argentine audience living under the government of Juan Manuel de Rosas. Its short life made it one of the most concentrated documents of that generation's ambitions.

The Generation of 1837 and the Salón Literario

To understand La Moda, it was necessary to understand the group that produced it. Once back in Buenos Aires from Tucumán, Alberdi became friends with Juan María Gutiérrez and Esteban Echeverría, and together they formed the core of the Generation of '37, a group of liberal intellectuals who met at the literary hall established by the bookseller Marcos Sastre. The group criticised both factions of the Argentine Civil Wars, deeming the federalists too violent and the unitarians incapable of ruling, and argued that both should end their disputes and work together toward a democratic, constitutional republic. When Governor Rosas forced Sastre to close the hall, the generation did not dissolve. It continued first in print and then as a secret society known as the May Association, in reference to the May Revolution. La Moda belonged to the print phase of that resistance: it was what a literary salon became when its meeting room was shut.

Founding in November 1837

The first issue of La Moda appeared on 18 November 1837. Alberdi had prepared the project together with Rafael Corvalán, and he wrote in it under the pseudonym Figarillo, a name borrowed from the tradition of Mariano José de Larra's Figaro in Spain. The choice of a fashion magazine as the form was deliberate and strategic. The publication followed the example of genres that had evolved in France after the revolution of 1830 — the journal of modes and manners, such as La Mode, published from 1829 — which offered detailed accounts of the latest trends in dress and toilette. Alberdi adapted that feminine-coded form to a different purpose. Where the French model cultivated the female consumer, La Moda used fashion, music and literature as a respectable cover under which a liberal programme of social transformation could be printed in Rosas's Buenos Aires without immediately presenting itself as a political newspaper.

Fashion as a Political Language

Scholars who studied La Moda stressed that its fashion writing was never only about clothes. Alberdi restored through it an older culture that linked sentimentalism, Enlightenment and social reform, and he knowingly adopted a feminine editorial role in front of the masculine, materialist model of power associated with Rosas. Articles on dress and conduct proposed European styles and modes of behaviour as signs of civilisation, and in doing so they carried judgements about race, class and national identity that historians later examined critically. The styles La Moda recommended were often irrelevant to, and unattainable by, the large majority of Argentina's inhabitants, and its vision of the ideal woman emphasised adornment in European fashion alongside motherhood, domesticity and passivity. Those limits were part of the historical record and should not be softened. La Moda expanded the public sphere for liberal ideas while imagining the nation through a narrow, elite and Europeanised lens.

Music, Literature and Romanticism

Beyond dress, La Moda dealt with the arts in general — above all literature and music, subjects on which Alberdi, the author of an early work on the spirit of music, wrote with genuine knowledge. The magazine helped introduce Romanticism to Argentina, presenting it not merely as a literary fashion but as part of a broader reorientation of sensibility: feeling, nature, individual expression and national literature against neoclassical rules inherited from the colonial period. That programme aligned La Moda with Echeverría and the other young writers of the generation, who shared a rejection of classical aesthetics and a search for an Argentine literature adequate to a new republic. In twenty-three weekly issues there was no room for a complete literary movement, but there was room for a declaration of intent, and that was what La Moda provided. Later histories of Argentine literature treated it as a founding gesture of the Romantic generation precisely because its pages gathered, in one place, the tastes and doctrines its contributors would develop in exile.

Alberdi and the Figarillo Voice

Alberdi's pseudonym Figarillo signalled the magazine's method. Like Larra's articles of customs in Madrid, the Figarillo pieces observed porteño society — its dances, its dress, its conversation — with irony, using small social scenes to make large arguments about backwardness, imitation and the need for reform. Alberdi was at the same time concerned with Argentina's legal order, and in the same prolific year of 1837 he wrote his Fragmento preliminar al estudio del derecho, the Preliminary Fragment on the Study of Law, which pointed to problems in the legal system and suggested solutions, laying foundations for Argentine legal historicism. La Moda and the Fragmento were companion works: one addressed society through manners, the other through law, and both asked how a republic could be built from customs as much as from constitutions. That pairing explained why a fashion magazine could matter to constitutional history.

Relations with Rosas and the Limits of Dissent

La Moda published under a government that had already closed the Salón Literario and watched the Generation of '37 closely. Its indirect method — politics carried inside fashion and criticism — bought it months, not years. The May Association, the generation's secret continuation, was discovered by the government, and most of its members emigrated to other countries. Alberdi himself emigrated to Uruguay in 1838, beginning the exile in which much of the generation's mature work, including the writings that eventually shaped the Constitution of 1853, would be produced. It would be wrong to present La Moda as an open opposition newspaper; it was not, and could not have survived a week if it had been. Its significance lay in showing how dissent adapted its form when direct political journalism was dangerous: the women's magazine, the pseudonym and the article on dress were protective devices, and readers of the time understood how to read through them.

Closure After Twenty-Three Issues

La Moda had a short life. Just twenty-three issues after its launch, the publication was forced to close, with its run ending on 21 April 1838. The dates were firmly established in the AHIRA archive listing, which recorded La Moda as published in the city of Buenos Aires between 18 November 1837 and 21 April 1838. No verified circulation figure for the magazine survives in the sources consulted for this profile, and no complete business record explains its finances; the honest account is that it ended as the political space around the Generation of '37 closed entirely, its hall shut, its association driven underground and its leading figures heading into exile. The magazine's closure therefore belonged to the biography of a generation rather than to the ordinary economics of magazine publishing. When Alberdi left for Uruguay in 1838, La Moda's project continued in other forms and other countries, but the Buenos Aires weekly itself was finished.

Legacy in Argentine Culture

The legacy of La Moda rested on the stature of the people and ideas it carried. Its founder became the principal thinker behind the Argentine Constitution, and historians therefore read his twenty-three-issue fashion weekly as an early laboratory of the liberal republic he later theorised. The magazine also left a methodological legacy for scholars: it became a central case in studies of the politics of dress and gender in nineteenth-century Argentine journalism, of science and sensibility in the Río de la Plata, and of how journalism served the Generation of '37 as one of the last fronts of resistance to Rosas's repression, through which its writers published works that became mainstays of nineteenth-century Argentine literature. For the WorldNM directory's purposes, La Moda stands as the clearest early example in Argentina of a magazine whose declared subject — fashion — was the least of what it was about. It was, in past tense and in full, a liberal cultural project dressed for survival.