Fashioning Spain: From Mantillas to Rosalía

The history of Spanish fashion, especially between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, has been studied in relative depth. However, Spanish fashion of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has not received the same attention and still needs to be developed as a field of research. Fashioning Spain: From Mantillas to Rosal ıa approaches this period in Spanish fashion not just from fashion history, but from a broad and heterogeneous perspective including fields spanning cinema, photography, music, underground movements and museography. This edited volume of eight articles is divided into four parts. The first, ‘Identity: Politics and Futures’, comprises two texts: ‘Accessorizing the Nation: Mantillas, Cultural Identity, and Modern Spain’ by In es Corujo-Mart ın and ‘Bodies of the Future: Comics, Fashion and 1980s Movida’ by Alberto Villamandos. Both authors explore Spanish fashion of this period through objects and media, using the mantilla and comics to show how these mediums expressed prevailing ideologies in recent history. The second part, ‘Picturing Femininity: Film and Photography’, consists of the papers ‘Women, Fashion and the Spanish Civil War: From the Fashion Parade to the Victory Parade’ by Kathleen M. Vernon and ‘From Market to Feminism: Fashion Photography during the Franco Dictatorship’ by Olga Sendra Ferrer. Both texts address the use of fashion as a tool to project different images of women in Spain in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. The third section, ‘Designing Fashion Stars: Film and Music’, comprises the articles ‘Fashioning Spanish Film Stars: Balenciaga and Conchita Montenegro’ and ‘Rosal ıa and the Rise of Poligonera Chic’. In the first, author Jorge P erez explains how the renowned actress Conchita Montenegro had to soften the image of femme fatale she had cultivated in Hollywood in the 1930s, to become a star of the Spanish screen in the 1940s, and how the wardrobe of her films, partly created by Balenciaga, was a key element in this process. Mary Kate Donovan explains in the second paper how the success of the singer Rosal ıa has contributed to popularising the poligono aesthetic, and the ways in which Rosal ıa has consolidated herself as a representative of another regional fashion of Spanish culture. The last section, entitled ‘Museums: From Closets to the Cloud’, consists of the articles ‘The Museo del Traje’s Research on Spanish Prêta-Porter’ by Juan Guti errez and ‘Curating Catalan Cultural Identity through Dress in the Virtual Fashion Museum of Catalonia’ by Nicholas Wolters. Through very different case studies, both authors explain the work on Spanish fashion that has been carried out in the museum sphere in recent decades, and highlight the research, conservation and dissemination challenges still pending in this field. The book is a good point of departure for the study of contemporary Spanish fashion, but the contributors faced an ambitious and complex task given the labyrinth of political, economic and social changes that have occurred, not only in