23. Making Spain Fashionable

Fashion and Design in Pedro Almodóvar's Cinema

Summary

The first film the author examines in this essay, Laberinto de pasiones/Labyrinth of Passion, released the year of Gonzalez's electoral victory, showcases the central role of fashion to the bohemian subcultures whose hedonistic lifestyles and iconoclastic artistic activities would be appropriated and projected by the Socialists' cultural agencies as the face of a liberated modern Spain, eager to claim a cutting-edge spot on the international cultural scene. Almodóvar's films depict individuals whose sense of a modern democratic identity - free of the inferiority complexes and defiant of the stereotypes generated by forty years of Fascism - is partly constructed and acted out through fashion. Although Almodóvar has occasionally continued his collaborations with renowned fashion designers to the present, his characters' fashion choices now seldom command the same audience attention that had long been a signature feature of an Almodóvar film.