Traditional Azorean Fashion

I just returned from a trip to the Azores, an idyllic Portuguese archipelago set way out in the Atlantic. One thing that I did not see there was the capote-e-capelo, a cloak that looks like it came straight from the pages of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. As late as the 1930s Azorean women wore the hooded garment, likely introduced to the islands in the late 1400s by Flemish settlers. Bad hair day? No worries with this outfit, it provided total coverage. Mark Twain referred to the capote-e-capelo as a "marvel of ugliness"  and gave it an unfavourable fashion review in his book Innocents Abroad in 1869:

 It fits like a circus tent, and a woman‘s head is hidden away in it like the man’s who prompts the singers from his tin shed in the stage of an opera [….] a woman can’t go within eight points of the wind with one of them on; she has to go before the wind or not at all.

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