Fashioning Spanish Cinema: Costume, Identity, and Stardom by Jorge Pérez (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fashioning Spanish Cinema: Costume, Identity, and Stardom by Jorge Pérez Joaquín Florido Berrocal Pérez, Jorge. Fashioning Spanish Cinema: Costume, Identity, and Stardom. U of Toronto P, 2021. Pp. 265. ISBN 978-1-4875-0911-8. Fashioning Spanish Cinema aims to offer answers to a variety of questions dealing with identity through the analysis of costumes in Spanish cinema across a diverse range of genres, periods, and artists. This monograph was published almost at the same time as Fashioning Spain: From Mantillas to Rosalía (2021), an edited volume about fashion that covers similar topics, and in which Jorge Pérez also contributes with a chapter about Balenciaga y Conchita Montenegro. These two, in fact, are at the center of Pérez's research in the first chapter of his book. Despite this coincidence, Fashioning Spanish Cinema is still the only monograph, at least up to the time of writing this review, focusing on Spanish film costume and fashion from an academic point of view and within the field of cultural studies. The volume contains a comprehensive introduction in which Jorge Pérez meticulously reveals the purpose of the book. Fashioning Spanish Cinema is essentially a study about identity—"gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, nationhood, and so on" (6)—and its expression through costume and fashion in Spanish cinema. While the volume analyzes diverse genres and topics, it keeps a strong sense of cohesiveness without losing the principal focus on identity. Fashioning Spanish Cinema also carries the reader on a temporal journey across Spanish cinema showing the developing of diverse identities along over 80 years of film history. Chapter 1 starts with the study of the haute couture French company Balenciaga's influence in the creation of film stars such as Conchita Montenegro, Sara Montiel, or Rocío Durcal. It also explores the Basque expatriate designer Cristóbal Balenciaga's way of benefiting from dressing Spanish actresses for three decades (1940s–60s) during Francisco Franco's dictatorship. Balenciaga's political position during that time is described as uncertain, but his work in Spanish films sure helped the designer stay in good terms with Franco's family to the point that both Franco's wife [End Page 327] and daughter did wear his clothes. The chapter serves as a historic introduction to the complex world of the costume industry in Spanish cinema. Although the connection with political history felt at times as if it were falling short of expressing the potential of the political power of costumes to create conflict and political turmoil, on the other hand, a deeper exploration would probably have been beyond this volume's scope of research. The second chapter continues the temporal exploration of Spanish cinema focusing on the films of Pedro Almodóvar and his relationship with the Chanel firm. This chapter is more accessible to those readers who may not have a background in the ins and outs of the film industry or are unfamiliar with Spanish films outside the established canon of pictures produced in the mid-20th century. The importance of Almódovar's choices of Chanel's costumes for his main characters is analyzed in depth to show how these selections create the means to express the director's ideas about gender and sexual identity. Chapter 3 signifies a noteworthy change in focus to men in underwear and their representation in film. From the sex comedies of the 1960s and early 1970s, where Spanish masculinity and virility is made an object of mockery, through the quinqui films of the late 1970s and early 1980s, where actors and their garments are, for the first time in Spain, specifically sexualized, the change in the Spanish gaze towards male actors is portrayed masterly. This part opens the possibility to explore the moment where contemporary young film stars such as Miguel Ángel Silvestre or Maxi Iglesias become symbols to emulate, giving way to the acceptance of different fashion styles and to the paradoxical monopolization of an explicit male body type. Thus, this chapter depicts the onscreen evolution of the male body modulated by the conversion of underwear into a fashion commodity. Race and ethnicity, represented in Spanish immigration films, are analyzed...