Horror Costuming: The Skin I Live In
Saturday, October 3, 2020 at 4:00PM In October, we'll be celebrating the excellence of costume design in horror cinema.
Pedro Almodóvar's 19th feature harkens back to a time two decades earlier when the Spanish director was one of European cinema's most shameless provocateurs, an enfant terrible willing to rub the face of polite society in utter tastelessness, jolly amorality, and lustful perversity. Adapted from a novel by Thierry Jonquet, The Skin I Live In is a sordid tale that mixes melodrama with horror, handsome mad scientists and beautiful Frankenstein monsters. More than anything, as its title suggests, this is a film about skin and the places people inhabit…
Clothes often act as a second skin. They shield our nakedness while serving as adornment, as signals through which we broadcast our tastes and interests, our aesthetic. In certain cases, they can hide, mask reality, and direct the eye of the beholder, either towards or away from the wearer. Costumes serve a lot of the same purposes, but they're also part of a film's mise-en-scène. The design of costumes is as connected to the bodies who wear them as it is in dialogue with visual themes, textual ideas, and the rest of a picture's formal elements.
In The Skin I Live In, costumes act as a second skin, but they don't hide anything. Here, they tell us more about the characters than their nude bodies ever could. In some regards, these people are more naked when they are clothed. That's never truer than when one talks of the film's mysterious protagonist. Her name's Vera (or is it?), and she's the prisoner of a genius doctor. Soon after the film starts, we are told that her captor is developing artificial skins, stronger than natural biology. She's his lab rat, her smooth skin his greatest creation.
To protect such bio-engineered perfection, Vera spends her days in tightly fit bodysuits. From a distance, she looks naked. Closer, though, it's impossible to ignore the raised seams and padded sections of her beige-colored garment. Each pattern piece is clearly delineated, making her body look like a patchwork of disparate pieces all stitched together to form a person. Vera's nakedness only shows smooth expanses of skin, her scarring faded into oblivion, so it's her costume that reveals what she really is – a rag doll, a cruel experiment.
While Paco Delgado is the film's credited costume designer, Jean-Paul Gaultier, working on his third Almodóvar flick, created Vera's three bodysuits – two skin-colored ones and a black alternative. For a couturier so associated with baroque maximalism, these designs are surprisingly minimal. The suits are stark, so simple they gain an eerie quality. Instead of erotic, their suggestion of nakedness is deeply disturbing. The design's never sexy, just uncanny in its illustration of an artificial order imposed over natural organisms.
The doctor's realm is one defined by such unnatural order. The décor may be punctuated by voluptuous paintings, but the general aesthetic is one of severity. Whenever he moves through the space in his formal attire, the man tends to match the walls, carpets, and furniture. So does his loyal housekeeper, whose purple pinafore-like apron strips her attire of any discernible personality. Another vision of the effects of the doctor's psychopathic exactitude manifests when we see his kidnapping of a young man who's chained and stripped down to a white t-shirt and briefs.
As the toil of capture wears him down, the soiled cotton of this kidnapee's clothes starts looking like battered skin. Later on, when his captor cleans and shaves him, the prisoner is dressed in green cloth which matches his eyes. Even his shaving cream is green. It would be funny if it wasn't all so grotesque. Because of such images, in her monochrome bodysuits, Vera fits right in with this crazy world of the doctor.
Only her bedroom tells another story, for the walls are covered in writing and drawings, an irregular pattern of jagged black lines. It doesn't fit with the rest of the house. These contrasts paint a story of a temple of psychopathic rule against a world of lush disorder with Vera as a member of that outside universe trapped inside the doctor's realm. Patterns and prints clash with minimal, obsessively matched colors, both in set and in costume design throughout The Skin I Live In.
When we get to know more of the characters' backstories, these visual dynamics further clue us into the true perversities waiting in the narrative's twists. The doctor's order is always violent and destructive, the women in his life consistently subjugated into being part of it until they all die because of it. Whether a young daughter trapped in layers of pink and lavender or three generations doomed to bloody ends in white nightgowns, the costumes are often more explicit in their storytelling than the script.
No sartorial choice more reflects this than the tiger suit worn by the housekeeper's estranged son, a criminal who invades the doctor's abode in a flurry of sexual aggression. Between fetishism and Carnival, that costume is a sight to behold, tacky, and impossible to look away from. Furthermore, the tiger's head over the crotch indicates a man guided by his lust, a primordial being willing to destroy others to satiate his hunger. It's also an explosion of absurdity that's almost humorous (again with sights so horrible they're almost funny), especially when we take in other tacky details like the penis-shaped tail, the superhero cape, and cowboy boots.
Even in terms of taste, that tiger printed mess is an affront to the house's stylish interiors. When such visual garishness infiltrates the place, it's a sign of violated order. Later on, we'll see a similar thing happen when hyperfeminine flower prints start to bloom throughout the house's inhabitants. When that happens, the attack against the doctor's rule isn't coming from the outside, but from within. Whatever the characters may say, whatever duplicity they might orchestrate, Delgado and Gaultier's costumes always tell the truth with equal parts disturbed horror and intoxicating beauty.
The Skin I Live in is available to rent online from multiple sources.
Reader Comments (4)
" The Skin I Live In" is such a great looking film but I wish it was better. Banderas gives a terrifying performance as the doctor determined to get his revenge on the man who he thinks raped his daughter but I think the film sort of jumps the shark when it turns into an incest melodrama
Man, that film fucking ruled. It was dangerous and intense yet I loved every second of it. 2011 was a great year for the elder statesmen of cinema. Almodovar, Malick, Scorsese, Cronenberg, Friedkin, Allen, von Trier, the Dardenne Brothers, Aki Kaurismaki, Polanski, and Soderbergh put out some of their best work. What were they on?
I wish I could love more this movie. I love all of its aspects separately.
It's one of Almodóvar's greatest and most provocative films.