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

Reviewed by: Fashioning Spanish Cinema: Costume, Identity, and Stardom by Jorge Pérez Annabel Martín Pérez, Jorge. Fashioning Spanish Cinema: Costume, Identity, and Stardom. U of Toronto P, 2021. 265 pp. Jorge Pérez's dazzling book on the conversations and entanglements between Spanish cinematography, couture, and the star system is an extraordinarily researched piece of scholarship that will open new avenues of critical research for decades to come. Fashioning Spanish Cinema is the first book of its kind to address the ways the body, its dressing, and the visual, social, and political codes of a time transform the story of "the costume" into the social history of a period. The book's impeccable research allows Pérez to engage with authority on the historical and cultural specificity of the commercial enterprise behind cinematography, on the film industry's happy marriage with capitalist modes of operation, on how this union both serves and can potentially undermine dictatorial and democratic political systems, and on the ways the construction of identity (gender, sexual, class, racial) within film's visual products demands particular kinds of feminine and masculine bodies within a capitalist consumer society. In this book, neither the costume nor its mannequin is addressed as passive, expendable, or disposable "objects." Pérez is more interested, and rightly so, in demonstrating how the dress is not only a consumable object of visual pleasure, of titillating exposure, an instrument of adornment, of glamor, or a simple prop. There is a story to tell that is in dialogue with issues of gender, class, and racial identity that are embroidered onto the cloth of the times, "naturally" occurring, so to speak, with historical specificity, tinted with the [End Page 544] ideological restraints, simplifications, and biases of a period. Nevertheless, in the hands of an astute director, in the sensibilities of audiences, or in the professional self-creation of a star, Fashioning Spanish Cinema argues that the costume is bigger than itself, many times surpassing the character it dresses, at times invisible, on occasion monumental. Hence, it comes as no surprise that in a book that deals with couture and stardom one would read fascinating critiques of how the dress positions itself as an active player in understanding how gender identity gets inscribed on bodies or in grasping how clothing becomes an actor in reproducing racist and neocolonial mindsets on Spanish screens. Pérez describes costume design as the "ugly duckling of the industry" (8) undervalued and secondary, stereotypically deemed frivolous and (hetero) normative. Fashioning Spanish Cinema underscores instead just how imperative this meaning-making device is within the semiotic codes of filmmaking and outlines its transgressive potential with aplomb (see Introduction). The thread running through the book centers on identity in its many manifestations. "Fashioning National Stars: Balenciaga and Spanish Cinema," "Almodóvar and Chanel: High Fashion, Desire, and Identity," and "Men in Underwear in Spanish Cinema" (Chapters 1–3) focus on clothing and the construction and outing of gender identity in the 1940s and during the 1960s desarrollismo years of the Franco dictatorship (Chapter One), on the mother-daughter relationship in two Almodovarian melodramas and on the role of couture in female agency (Chapter Two), and on the radical transformation of masculine undergarment's social, cultural, and gender meanings on the screen (Chapter Three); "Dressing the Immigrant Other" (Chapter Four) shifts from gender and centers on the costume of racialized identity in films addressing the migrant subject; and "Self-Fashioning Stardom: The Red Carpet Matters" (Chapter Five) on couture and stardom agency. The themes the book addresses are rich, suggestive, and trailblazing on many levels. Chapter One's focus on cinematography and fashion during the Franco dictatorship leads Pérez to discuss how within the logic of National-Catholicism all things modern are necessarily associated with decadence and death, in Benjaminian fashion. Despite the dictatorship's easy acceptance of capitalist growth and partial liberalization of cultural mores, it did resent the creation of a materialistic society antithetical to the values of National-Catholicism. The Franco regime might have been anachronistic in the limitations it secured in most political, social, and cultural manifestations but it was, on the other hand, a model student in...

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