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Yesterday, word came that Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature, Julieta, would hit theaters this December. It’s welcome news—in particular for the fashion set. Almodóvar’s hyper-stylized (and hyper-stylish) films are favorites among industry types. Consider masterpieces like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown to Volver and Matador, and Kika, on which he collaborated with kindred maximalist spirits Gianni Versace and Jean Paul Gaultier for the costumes—fans in the U.K. can see them all as part of the British Film Institute Southbank’s lately mounted Almodóvar retrospective, which runs into October.
His countrywoman, the actress Rossy de Palma, looms large across the landscape of the director’s oeuvre. A muse to Almodóvar since he discovered her at a Madrid café in the mid-’80s, she has been described by many as “a Picasso come to life.” It’s little wonder, then, that the idiosyncratic bombshell has proved such a heady inspiration to designers who love their women unapologetic and larger than life—talents like Thierry Mugler and, most notably, De Palma’s longtime friend Gaultier. She’s turned up countless times on his runways, bearing a nose ring and stick of incense in Spring 1994’s tenor-setting Les Tatouages show, and stripping out of her suit and down to a barely there bustier to the tune of RuPaul’s “Supermodel” for Spring ’15. Among the other minds this major Majorcan has set alight? A young Lee McQueen: She walked alongside the likes of Carolyn Murphy and Stella Tennant for his divisive Givenchy debut, The Golden Fleece, during Spring 1997 haute couture. Here, we revisit nine of Rossy de Palma’s runway cameos over the years.
See Rossy de Palma introduce Pedro Almodóvar’s The Flower of My Secret(1995)on August 29 at BFI Southbank.