The ‘‘dressed body’’ in the filmography of Pedro Almodóvar. Uses and discourses of age and clothing in queer cinema.

Abstract

This article is presented as a retrospective research that includes a study of age and clothing within Pedro Almodóvar's cinema in terms of production of dissident narratives and representation. The object of study is approached methodologically from a qualitative approach to the concept of ‘‘dressed body’’, as well as a quantitative study of measurement by accumulation of variables of Chus Lampreave's participation in the director's filmography. An initial sample of eight films was collected, among which twenty appearances on screen stand out. Thus, the results describe the variables analyzed through the stage representations of Chus Lampreave, which suggests a progressive incorporation of aesthetic strategies such as clothing styling to capture age and aging in his characters. The study closes with a discussion about the discourses linked to these representations, revealing that most of them adhere to the predominant conventions about old age present in conventional cinema. This places the investigated practice at a meeting point between established norms and another area that challenges those same norms, thus configuring an intersection in which normative and dissident currents intermittently converge around the representation of age.