In 1955, Marilyn Monroe made history with a sequence and a dress: that scene with the white skirt in the air. Temptation lives aboveThe dress, which has gone down in history, was designed by William Travilla, the actress’s go-to costume designer, who has dressed her throughout her life since that film. The dress, carefully thought out, carefully designed by the designer, carefully crafted for the occasion, later passed into the hands of Debbie Reynolds, the star of Singing in the rain, who was a devotee of the blonde actress, who later auctioned it off. The person who had it in his day did the same in 2011 and someone, no one knows who, bought it for the outrageous sum of 5,500,000 dollars.
Many years after that Hollywood premiere, in February 1987, it reached theaters in Spain The law of desirePedro Almodóvar’s sixth film. In it, actress Carmen Maura starred in a scene that has gone down in national history: the sequence in which Maura, on a torrid summer night in Madrid, stops in front of a gardener with a hose, in front of the Conde Duque barracks, and begs him to water her. The man does so and Maura’s face, her delight, her phrases, the jet of water directly on her body, her soaked dress, the air of freedom that it gave off, have remained as an iconic frame of Almodóvar’s cinema.
That garment, a tight, elastic dress with a zipper, bright orange, was not by José María Cossío, the costume designer for that film, nor by Antonio Alvarado, the creator of the colorful shirt worn first by Eusebio Poncela and then by Antonio Banderas, who is the driving force of the film’s narrative, by the way. Both, Alvarado and Cossío, were very good friends of the director in those days of the movida madrileña. Nor was the dress from any high-end brand, like those that would work with Almodóvar after that film. No, pay attention: it was a dress from Blanco, a fast fashion store (something like the predecessor of Bershka) that filled Spanish cities in the eighties and nineties.
It was all a coincidence. According to Cossío himself, they bought it “at Blanco for 2,000 pesetas (12 euros today), we needed a practical dress that could get wet, and that was perfect.” Nobody in the wardrobe department or at the production company El Deseo remembers much more. Nobody gave much importance to that dress at the time, nobody, not even Pedro Almodóvar himself, supposed that it would go down in history. Where is it? Nobody knows either, they don’t remember where it ended up. Of course there was no auction, or anything like that.
And why Blanco? Well, it was an accessible, modern store, unusual for its time, the predecessor of Zara, or Mango, which was completely disruptive. It was, how would we say, a chav with pretensions? It was a different store, where any young person who wanted to get away from the established without spending a fortune, could find the perfect outfit for that dissipated or furious life that he wanted to lead. Its creator, the businessman Bernardo Blanco Solana opened his first store in Bilbao in 1960 but the boom The real arrival took place decades later. It arrived in Madrid, and in the 80s, its shop windows were filled with “fashion clothes”, with shoulder pads, prints, etc. The chain was successful in Spain and around the world, it was alone in its style for a long time, and decades later, when similar competition was already fierce, it closed its doors.
The German-Madrid costume designer Bina Digeler, who worked with Almodóvar in All about my mother and in Return, She has a clear memory of the film and the scene and an idea about why that dress has gone down in film history. “One of the reasons I was drawn to Spain was because of the movies “I love Pedro Almodóvar and that particular film. I have always been and am a fan of his films and I think he is one of the most influential living directors because of his visual language. I love that film, and the script and those powerful characters,” says the designer. For Daigeler, this dress contains many of the things that an outfit in a film should fulfil. In this case it was “a powerful colour, it is bold, it is sexyit looks great on the protagonist, who obviously enjoyed wearing it. Sometimes, as in this case, in costume design you are lucky enough to find something in an unexpected store.”
Carmen Maura has said that her character in that film, Tina, is the one she has enjoyed doing the most, even though doing so meant emptying herself “as if my brains had been sucked out.” And about the scene in question she has told in many interviews how it happened: “They told the gardener at the Town Hall to plug the hose into me, but the force was such that I fell to the ground, so we had to go to a bar to dry me, my hair, my dress, my makeup and start again.” Another curiosity is that the scene was dubbed, because the sound, with the water in the background, was not good. “We did it following Pedro’s instructions, who told me ‘Come on, water me!’ And then it turned out so beautiful. That is one of the magical things about cinema: everything is a lie, but then everything is true,” Maura has said.
The fact that the dress was made of white and so cheap is also something to be said. This was Almodóvar’s sixth film and the first that he produced with his own company, El Deseo. To make it happen, the filmmaker, who believed fervently in it, asked for a personal loan and assumed all the risks. The result? One of his most personal films, a great gay melodrama that no one had dared to film. The first movie from Spanish cinema in which someone says fuck me and then fuck me.
In the book The Almodóvar Archives(Taschen 2011), the director from La Mancha explains, referring to his role as a producer, that knowing the price of things is horrible: “I maintain a daily struggle to not do without what is essential, but so far it is working out.” And about Carmen Maura: “I don’t know if she is the best actress in Spanish cinema, but she is certainly the one who understands me best. When we work together we are both better. What she does in this film is inexplicable.” According to Bina Digeler, Carmen Maura’s dress meets the director’s demands: “It must correspond to her visual style, they must be fabrics that photograph beautifully, with a powerful result on the screen and that fit the character, that always enhance women.” And there is the Blanco piece, perfect on Maura’s body.
In that same book, the director speaks of “fashion as a way of life”: heels “as a way of coping with his anguish,” for example. The designer Francis Montesinos, who worked with him in his early days (the work of Among darkness, (with Marisa Paredes) remembers that “Pedro understood fashion as a lifestyle, as an extension of everything he did. The two of us didn’t talk about fashion in a technical way, like, ‘look at that neckline or I want this cut’… but about feelings, about how people feel when they get dressed. We understood each other well because fashion was the same for both of us.”
And Tina, in this scene of “Water me!” has “feelings.” She is a troubled, tragic woman, with a desire to live, with love to give, who is afraid, a trans woman who knows what she is and what she is not, who carries a childhood trauma of abuse, and she is in that almost tropical Madrid summer. And then, by chance, that fresh, hard water reaches her body, which is another body, finally, and she picks it up and turns it into a symbol: it is freedom, what she wants to be, calm, madness, transgression. And all that, with a 12-euro dress. The famous magic of cinema, once again.
The times were to come when Almodóvar would be disputed by haute couture brands, with which he would never stop collaborating. Like that Chanel by Victoria Abril in High Heels, or that Armani by Marisa Paredes, who also wore that green dress by Sybilla, when she sings Think of me, by Luz Casal. Or that diamond-patterned Versace sweater that Victoria Abril wore in prison and that belonged to the director’s personal wardrobe. Only a director like him is capable of taking out a prisoner dressed in Versace.
And of course it was also coming Kikain 1993, and that Gaultier worn by Andrea Caracortada, the character played by Abril, and which is the first haute couture design to appear in an Almodóvar film and which was made exclusively for the occasion. And Armani returns and dresses Verónica Forqué in this film as well.
The fact is that, since then, his cinema is full of international brands: Max Mara, who dresses Marisa Paredes and her Amanda Gris in The flower of my secret; more Gaultier, more Chanel, more Armani, and Dolce&Gabbana and Prada and Marc Jacobs and Dior and Pierre Cardin and Hermès bags and David Delfín, and Amaya Arzuaga, the list is endless. And Cossío, or Sonia Grande or the aforementioned Bina Diegaler, as her costume directors.
According to Diegaler’s experience with Almodóvar, “Pedro loves fashion designers, he loves seeing the collections, knowing where they are going, for him it is a fundamental tool in his work.” He remembers with special pleasure his work in Return“For me it was wonderful because we did a lot of things with designers. Pedro had very clear ideas about who he wanted to work with, but we also made a lot of other things with fabrics that I had bought, to dress Penelope, for example. I have always liked this mix of haute couture and second-hand clothes, I think it gives a very powerful richness. I remember one time, we were looking for a very special bag in size and style. We looked at all the designers and in the end I found it in a cheap shop and we never told anyone about it,” she jokes.
Pedro Almodóvar told in a retrospective of his films at the Filmoteca in Madrid, with The law of desire as the protagonist, who once, chatting with Susan Sontag, “told me that the hose scene had become iconic, like the one of Marilyn lifting her dress in Temptation lives above. When the water arch is formed, I wanted to symbolize the sanctification of that family formed by Carmen, Eusebio and the girl Manuela. It was as if the three of them were passing through the altar.” Pedro hoped that the spectators, especially the new ones, would appreciate that cycle. The law of desire “Because it is a very contemporary film. It is melodramatic and baroque, but there is a celebration of existence, of the good and the bad. It is a film to suffer and live.”
