Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid

by Francisco Fernandez de Alba

Overview

During the last decade of Franco’s repressive rule, the Spanish outlook on sex, drugs, and fashion shifted dramatically, creating a favourable cultural environment for the return of democracy. Exploring changes in urban planning, narratives of sexual and gender identity, recreational drug use, and fashion design during the seventies, Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid argues that it was during this decade that the material and emotional conditions for the groundbreaking transition to democracy first began to develop.

Thanks in part to a mass media saturated with international trends, citizens of Madrid began to adopt practices, behaviours, and attitudes that would ultimately render Franco’s military dictatorship obsolete. This cultural history examines these modest but irreversible changes in the way people lived and thought about their lives during the last decade of the regime’s creed. Not a revolution necessarily, but transformational nevertheless, these changes in collective sensibility eased the political transition to democracy and the emergence of the 1980s’ cultural movement la Movida.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487501488
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	03/26/2020
Series:	Toronto Iberic
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.75(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Francisco Fernández de Alba is an associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Wheaton College.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction. 1970s Madrid: The Dawn of a New Sensibility

1. Madrid: Planning the Democratic City
2. Sex: Building Plural Communities
3. Drugs: The Burden of Modernity
4. Fashion: Democracy Prêt-à-Porter

Conclusion: Legacies of the 1970s: The Origins of la Movida

Notes
Works Cited
Index

What People are Saying About This

Kathleen M. Vernon

"Francisco Fernández de Alba reads an impressive range of sources, from down-market destape films to intellectually substantive articles in influential magazines such as Triunfo and Cuadernos para el diálogo, to reveal the layered cultural sediment underlying the transformations in affects, values, and behaviours taking place during Spain's long 1970s."

Susan Larson

"Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid is an innovative cultural history that digs deep into both the urban politics and everyday life of the last decade of the Franco dictatorship in order to better historicize and even problematize some of our common assumptions about the role of Spain's capital in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Fernández de Alba skilfully demonstrates the inner workings of the reciprocal nature between the material conditions and cultural imaginaries of Madrid. During this period in the city's history politicians, urban planners, and working-class neighbourhood associations worked together to solve serious issues, resulting in new, more hybrid democratic urban identities. This book will be immensely illuminating for anyone interested in urban studies, affect, and popular culture in the age of consumer capitalism."

Jo Labanyi

"This study of the emergence of a specific kind of youth culture in 1970s Spain is a welcome reminder that the key features of the Madrid Movida were anticipated and made possible by changes in social habits that occurred in that decade, if not earlier in some cases. Particularly fascinating is the study of the evolution of the fashion industry, which allowed a 'democratization of taste' before political democracy arrived."

Editorial Reviews

"Sex, Drugs, and Fashion expertly rewrites social history in the 1970s and offers a new and earlier context for the overfamiliar movida."—Paul Julian Smith, CUNY Graduate Center, Revista Hispánica Moderna

"This study of the emergence of a specific kind of youth culture in 1970s Spain is a welcome reminder that the key features of the Madrid Movida were anticipated and made possible by changes in social habits that occurred in that decade, if not earlier in some cases. Particularly fascinating is the study of the evolution of the fashion industry, which allowed a ‘democratization of taste’ before political democracy arrived."

—Jo Labanyi, College of Arts and Science, New York University

" Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid is an innovative cultural history that digs deep into both the urban politics and everyday life of the last decade of the Franco dictatorship in order to better historicize and even problematize some of our common assumptions about the role of Spain’s capital in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Fernández de Alba skilfully demonstrates the inner workings of the reciprocal nature between the material conditions and cultural imaginaries of Madrid. During this period in the city’s history politicians, urban planners, and working-class neighbourhood associations worked together to solve serious issues, resulting in new, more hybrid democratic urban identities. This book will be immensely illuminating for anyone interested in urban studies, affect, and popular culture in the age of consumer capitalism."

—Susan Larson, Charles B. Qualia Professor of Romance Languages, Texas Tech University

"Francisco Fernández de Alba reads an impressive range of sources, from down-market destape films to intellectually substantive articles in influential magazines such as Triunfo and Cuadernos para el diálogo, to reveal the layered cultural sediment underlying the transformations in affects, values, and behaviours taking place during Spain’s long 1970s."

—Kathleen M. Vernon, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature, Stony Brook University

From the Publisher

“Sex, Drugs, and Fashion expertly rewrites social history in the 1970s and offers a new and earlier context for the overfamiliar movida.”

Revista Hispánica Moderna - Paul Julian Smith

"Francisco Fernández de Alba reads an impressive range of sources, from down-market destape films to intellectually substantive articles in influential magazines such as Triunfo and Cuadernos para el diálogo, to reveal the layered cultural sediment underlying the transformations in affects, values, and behaviours taking place during Spain's long 1970s."

Kathleen M. Vernon

"Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid is an innovative cultural history that digs deep into both the urban politics and everyday life of the last decade of the Franco dictatorship in order to better historicize and even problematize some of our common assumptions about the role of Spain's capital in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Fernández de Alba skilfully demonstrates the inner workings of the reciprocal nature between the material conditions and cultural imaginaries of Madrid. During this period in the city's history politicians, urban planners, and working-class neighbourhood associations worked together to solve serious issues, resulting in new, more hybrid democratic urban identities. This book will be immensely illuminating for anyone interested in urban studies, affect, and popular culture in the age of consumer capitalism."

Susan Larson

"This study of the emergence of a specific kind of youth culture in 1970s Spain is a welcome reminder that the key features of the Madrid Movida were anticipated and made possible by changes in social habits that occurred in that decade, if not earlier in some cases. Particularly fascinating is the study of the evolution of the fashion industry, which allowed a 'democratization of taste' before political democracy arrived."

Jo Labanyi