Fashioning Spanish Cinema. Costume, Identity, and Stardom by Jorge Pérez

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fashioning Spanish Cinema. Costume, Identity, and Stardom by Jorge Pérez Francisco Fernández de Alba Pérez, Jorge. Fashioning Spanish Cinema. Costume, Identity, and Stardom. U of Toronto P, 2021. 265 pp. ISBN: 978-4875-0911-8. This interdisciplinary new book by Jorge Pérez is full of illuminating insights about fashion and costume design in Spanish films. Some scholars who have previously devoted attention to the topic are Paul Julian Smith, Kathleen Vernon, and Eva Woods Peiró, though none dedicated monographs to the subject as completely as Pérez. Five chapters compose this book. The introduction is a foundational theoretical discussion regarding the difference between costume design and fashion, or the tension between feminist theory and fashion. The remaining chapters are meant to stand independently, and the author warns that they do not build to a general history of fashion and film. Neither are they organized chronologically. Instead, the book is driven by specific topics such as fashion labels and film directors, the examination of costume choices, and the supplemental meanings that costumes generate beyond characters' authenticity or verisimilitude. Despite the author's warning, I nevertheless perceive a general organizational principle in which the first and second [End Page 170] chapters focus on synergies generated by the collaboration between high fashion and film; in which chapters three and four aim to illuminate what is missing (more on this later); and in which the final chapter addresses the self-fashioning of stardom, or actors' off-screen need to produce and curate their personal brand as yet another professional skill. Chapter 1 discusses master couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga and his work for actors such as Conchita Montenegro, Sara Montiel, and Rocío Dúrcal. This chapter is a must-read for anyone interested in Balenciaga because it offers new details about his professional practice vis-à-vis the film industry. The chapter contains nuanced readings of several films and the way in which Balenciaga's designs functioned in (and out of) the films. Chapter 2 similarly focuses on labels and directors, in this case Almodóvar and the house of Chanel. Pérez concludes that the participation of designers in making costumes for film goes beyond symbiotic publicity, that we should consider as well the agency of actors, the interaction with design labels, and that couture, a spectacle into itself, creates narratives and affects independent of the films in which it is displayed. I mentioned earlier that chapters 3 and 4 could be conceptualized as "what is missing." Men's costume is often a missing part of fashion or film studies. Pérez's response is to start from the beginning, with the first piece of clothing many western men put on each day, by dedicating chapter three to thoroughly exploring men's underwear. From the comedia sexy to cine quinqui, men in underwear are represented as backward or modern, ridiculous comedic relief or sexual objects. Pérez argues that we can mark the stages of development of Spanish culture throughout the twentieth century by the type of underwear worn and the circumstances in which we see actors in their undergarments. In Chapter 4, Pérez details the ways in which immigrants are (un)dressed in recent Spanish films. Missing in some movies, Pérez tells us, are clear references to the scopic regime and awareness of the coloniality of power. The chapter explores how clothes (re)produce or confront dominant race relations by oversignifying non-white actors' attire or the lack of it. Even when movies are pushing for equality and integration, race and ethnicity continues to be marked in film by the sartorial hyper-visibility of the non-white immigrant body. Pérez concludes that the evolution of these films moves from exotifying and eroticizing through garment choice to, in the most recent movies, the possibility of a non-sexual transnational community emerging through fashion and style choices. Chapter 5 takes the readers from the screen to the red carpet. In a chapter that feels a rushed at the end, Pérez explains how having a personal sense of style has recently become a requirement for actors. From Victoria Abril to Penélope Cruz, briefly touching on...