Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid by Francisco Fernández de Alba

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid by Francisco Fernández de Alba Sarah Thomas Keywords Spanish Cultural Studies, Cultural History, Madrid, 1970s, Tardofranquismo, Transition To Democracy, Mass Media, Urban Studies, Sex, Sexuality, Gender, Drug Use, Heroin, Fashion, Identity, Consumerism, Modernity, Democratization, Francisco Fernández De Alba, Sarah Thomas fernández de alba, francisco. Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid. U of Toronto P, 2020. 192 pp. Peninsular studies have lately seen renewed interest in and reevaluation of the end of the Franco dictatorship (tardofranquismo) and the country’s transition to democracy. Francisco Fernández de Alba’s contribution to this debate, Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid, offers an exciting and rigorous approach, framing its study within the confines of the long 1970s (roughly 1966–1982) and the city of Madrid, while gesturing beyond both. The product of extensive research in several archives, the book shows how Spain in the seventies was far from simply a repressed dictatorial nation, but rather, a place of rapidly changing Zeitgeist and social mores, where an important “re-structuring of feeling” (9) was underway. In this context, Fernández de Alba illuminates how several interrelated factors—mass media, consumer capitalism, and international cultural trends—fostered new forms of self-fashioning and inspired democratizing practices in a complex and contradictory decade. The book begins with an introduction that sets the scene: no longer the Spain of autarky and isolation, it depicts a place where “deep cultural changes were already afoot” (3) as early as 1970, when Televisión Española broadcast [End Page 647] the Tele-Club Campo-Pop competition, for bands from towns with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. This opening example demonstrates how tardofranquismo was a time of surprising (often carefully calibrated) contradictions, with youth from the rural periphery performing rock songs in miniskirts on national television. Although typical of the regime’s middle-class appeasement via superficial relaxation of social mores, Fernández de Alba shows that Campo-Pop also indicated how young people were already embracing the more liberal culture and values they saw emerging elsewhere. The introduction demonstrates how international cultural products accessible through mass media—music, fashion, and critical works by authors like Susan Sontag or Henri Lefebvre—were key in shaping the period’s emerging mentalities and practices. This cultural shift did not exclusively emerge from outside, however, but also through local efforts of cooperatives, neighborhood associations, and other cultural agents whose radical democratizing views were a vital ingredient of the new collective sensibility. Organizations such as these come to the fore in chapter one, an engrossing account of the period’s radical urbanism. It skillfully narrates a fascinating history of calls for a more inclusive, accessible capital. Bookended by Mayor Enrique Tierno Galván’s 1979 inaugural speech, it shows how his novel pluralist approach was informed by ideas long brewing in neighborhood associations and architectural debates throughout the seventies. The influence of avant-garde urban planning is carefully traced through lucid analyses of figures like architect Antonio Fernández Alba and documents like the 1970 special issue of Cuadernos para el Diálogo, “Urbanismo y sociedad en España” or the Communist Party’s 1977 comprehensive plan Madrid para la democracia: la propuesta de los comunistas, both building toward 1985’s revolutionary Plan General, where “the right to fully inhabit and alter the city was to be implemented, both at the grassroots level with the input of social actors and citizens, and from the top to shape priorities and provide a totalizing vision” (35). Alongside these architectural debates and paradigm shifts, key conceptualizations of the alternative city also emerged from urban social movements (to use the formulation of Manuel Castells, another touchstone of the chapter). Several through-lines are established here that will echo throughout the book: the uneasy relationships between new cultural practices and capitalism; the reception and adaptation of cultural materials from outside Spain to its unique context; and how the 1970s laid the groundwork for the explosive freedoms of the Movida. Although ultimately the culminating 1985 [End Page 648] Plan General did not have its radical goals fully realized, Fernández de Alba notes that it did something...