Fashioning a Consumerist Transition

Fashioning a Consumerist Transition Paul Julian Smith KEYWORDS Transition to Democracy, Spanish Cinema, Fashion, Stardom, Sex, Drugs, Consumption, Democratization FRANCISCO FERNÁNDEZ DE ALBA. Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid. U of Toronto P, 2020, 169 pp. ALEJANDRO J. GÓMEZ DEL MORAL. Buying into Change: Mass Consumption, Dictatorship, and Democratization in Franco's Spain, 1939–1982. U of Nebraska P, 2021, 163 pp. JORGE PÉREZ. Fashioning Spanish Cinema: Costume, Identity, and Stardom. U of Toronto P, 2021, 265 pp. Three ground-breaking books offer new contributions to Spanish cultural studies based on novel approaches. And they have much in common. Two of them appear in University of Toronto's ambitious Iberic series; two of them treat the still relatively rare topic of fashion; two reevaluate the much-treated question of the Transition to democracy. Most importantly perhaps, rather than opting for ideological critique, all three adopt a sympathetic attitude to their sometimes dismissed topics, arguing respectively that fashion in film is by no means trivial but rather crucial to the construction of cultural identities; that late Francoist attitudes to sex, drugs, and fashion were not simply hedonistic but rather worked to create a favorable outlook for social reform; and that mass consumption in such neglected areas as department stores, advertising, and supermarkets, far from mesmerizing a passive public, created a citizenship actively eager for a cosmopolitan democratization that challenged Francoist models of Spanish exceptionalism. Jorge Pérez's Fashioning Spanish Cinema: Costume, Identity, and Stardom will perhaps feel the most familiar to Peninsularists, in that it focuses on film, a medium long central to the discipline, and gives accessible accounts of narrative and visual styles in individual works, some of them well known. However, Fashioning draws on an impressive range of disciplines, from the history of dress (which it carefully [End Page 229] distinguishes from the related but distinct terms of fashion, costume, and wardrobe) to celebrity and gender studies. And its new focus retrieves much valuable and piquant history: the handsome cover shows Conchita Montenegro, a Francosupporting star with whom I was previously unfamiliar, in the aptly titled Ídolos (Florián Rey, 1943). She wears an extravagantly tasseled and ruffled black dress and hat by Balenciaga, both of which Pérez submits to close and loving analysis. (These detailed explorations of individual garments are one of the delights of his monograph.) Most importantly in a book which has no explicit chronological through line, it is fashion, not film, that dictates the overall structure. Thus, Montenegro appears in the first chapter "Fashioning national stars: Balenciaga and Spanish cinema," while the second chapter ("High fashion, desire, and modernity") charts the continuing trace of Chanel in Almodóvar, from Victoria Abril's prim white suit in Tacones lejanos (1991), via Antonia San Juan's tacky knock-off in Todo sobre mi madre (1999), to Penélope Cruz's jewelry-heavy evening gown, in which she is almost literally "chained by wealth and affluence" in Los abrazos rotos (2009). Significant here is the choice as object of study of the classic Chanel brand, revealing as it does Pérez's acute attention to the contribution of less showy costume to Almodóvar's narrative universe than, say, the bizarre pieces or "spectacular interventions" (18) by Jean Paul Gaultier that have attracted most attention from other critics (including myself). The enterprising Pérez does not neglect less familiar fields of fashion studies either, devoting a further chapter to male garments and more specifically underwear (alternately clownish in the sexy comedia and queasily erotic in La tía Tula [Miguel Picazo, 1964], an unexpected choice); and "dressing the immigrant other," where costume once more plays a crucial role, at once aesthetic and political, in fiction feature films like the emblematically named El traje (Alberto Rodríguez [2002]). Finally, Pérez boldly ventures outside the film text itself, to address the crucial institution of the red carpet and the canny self-fashioning of female stars' public images, from Victoria Abril's defiant eccentricity to Penélope Cruz's meticulously crafted old Hollywood-style glamor. As Pérez writes of their self-conscious practice: By foregrounding their agency and authorship in the process of...

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