The warehouse sits in an industrial park south of Madrid, between a tile wholesaler and a company that rents scaffolding. Nothing on the outside suggests what is inside: forty thousand costumes worn in films and television productions over the past century, hanging in climate-controlled aisles that stretch for the length of a football pitch. The temperature is held at eighteen degrees, the humidity at fifty percent, and the lights are kept low, because light, the archivist explains, is slow fire.
The archivist is Amparo Villaseñor, sixty-two, who has run the Archivo Textil Castellana since 1998. She trained as a conservator of religious textiles, restoring altar cloths and vestments in cathedrals across Andalusia, and came to film by accident, when a production company asked her to assess a collection of period gowns it was about to throw away. She saved the gowns, persuaded a group of costume houses to pool their stock, and never went back to the cathedrals.
The collection is extraordinary in its range. There are brocade coats from historical epics of the 1950s, their gold thread tarnished to the colour of weak coffee. There are dozens of nearly identical grey suits from a 1970s spy series, each subtly altered for a different stunt double. There is an entire rack of wedding dresses, one of which has appeared, remodelled, in fourteen productions. Villaseñor knows the history of almost every piece and can locate most of them without consulting the catalogue.
Clothes that still work
What distinguishes the archive from a museum is that most of its contents are still available for hire. Villaseñor regards this not as a compromise but as the point. A costume, she argues, is a working object, made to move and sweat and be photographed, and it deteriorates faster in a sealed box than on a body that knows how to wear it. Productions renting from the archive sign strict agreements, and her team sends a dresser along with anything particularly fragile.
A dress in a glass case is a corpse. A dress on an actor is a person again. My job is to keep them alive between roles.
Not everyone agrees. Some conservators argue that historically significant garments should be retired permanently, and Villaseñor has faced pointed criticism for lending a nineteenth-century mantilla to a television drama. She listens, and she has retired a small number of pieces she considers irreplaceable. But she remains convinced that an archive which cannot be used will eventually stop being funded, and that the best protection for these clothes is to keep them useful.
Her team of eleven includes tailors, dyers and two young conservators she trained herself. Every garment that returns from a production is inspected, cleaned by hand where necessary and repaired using techniques appropriate to its period. A recent project involved rebuilding the collapsed boning of a corset worn in a 1960s musical, using a substitute for whalebone made from recycled plastic. It took four months. The corset has since been worn in two more films.
Walking the aisles, Villaseñor stops occasionally to straighten a sleeve or adjust a hanger, the way a gardener might pinch back a leaf. She pauses at a black velvet cape, worn by a villain in a forgotten horror film from 1963, and runs her hand along the hem. It needs attention, she says, and makes a note. Then she moves on, past a century of borrowed lives, each waiting quietly for its next role.
