From Drag Glamour to Ava Gardner Glamour

Last Sunday I went to the “Drag Glamour” event at the Tate Modern during the Fashion in Film Festival.

The programme included two films, José Rodríguez-Soltero’s Life, Death and Assumption of Lupe Velez (1966), featuring Mario Montez, and Ron Rice’s psychedelic masterpiece Chumlum (1964), starring Jack Smith and Montez.

Both the films are very inspiring from a fashion point of view thanks to their lavishly glamorous costumes and the use of multiple superimposition that turns the movies into veritable orgies of colours, filmic distortions and optical illusions.

Smith and Montez (who debuted on the screen with Flaming Creatures in the early 60s), shared a sort of obsession with Hollywood 1940s star, Maria Montez (the “Maria Montez-Vera West-Mario Montez”-connection actually deserves a post on its own…).

Well known for his skills at costume design and make up, Mario Montez established the Montez-Creations costume house, becoming one of Warhol’s favourite screen icons as well as the Factory’s first drag Superstar.

The films were introduced by Ronald Gregg, Senior Lecturer and Programming Director, Film Studies at Yale University, who made reference in his programme notes also to the fact that Mario Montez was inspired by films such as Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers (1935) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954), starring Ava Gardner as Maria Vargas and with costumes by the Sorelle Fontana (Fontana Sisters) fashion house.

I’m currently hunting some photographic materials, sketches and costumes from The Barefoot Contessa for another project and, while watching Rodríguez-Soltero’s film on Mexican Hollywood star Lupe Velez, images of Ava Gardner in the elegantly sophisticated Fontana gowns kept on coming back to my mind (there are actually also echoes of Rodríguez-Soltero’s film in the glamorous and over the top costumes/sets and in the soundtrack of Tsai Ming-Liang's Visage).

Guess I will have to re-watch The Barefoot Contessa soon and try to spot new parallelisms with Mario Montez's aesthetics and sense of style.