We’re still a month away from the premiere of Zoolander 2, but already glimpses have surfaced of key figures in Derek and Hansel’s new life—significantly among them, February cover star Penélope Cruz. Whether or not Cruz’s character, Valentina Valencia, a motorcycle-riding fashion special agent, will weaken in the face of a Blue Steel stare-down remains to be seen, but in a dominatrix superhero skintight red leather suit and scarlet Christian Louboutin boots with stiletto heels so formidable they do resemble actual weapons, she appears equipped for the challenge.
Fashion in Derek Zoolander’s world is ultraserious business. In Penélope Cruz’s world, it’s an intrinsic element of some of her most memorable roles on film. Fashion has yielded the second significant muse relationship for Cruz, too: While her longtime connection to filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar has transformed both of their careers, she has worked with costume designer Sonia Grande on a number of films. “Penélope is the actress with whom I have worked the most throughout my career and is somewhat of an idol,” Grande has said. “She is an extremely inspiring woman.” Here, nine of the fashion looks on film that have defined Penélope Cruz’s career.
Director: Fernando Trueba
Costume designer: Lala Huete
In Trueba’s bucolic Spanish comedy, a soldier goes AWOL ahead of the country’s impending civil war and, like a visiting prince in a fairy tale, charms his way through the beautiful daughters on a wealthy country estate. This was Cruz’s second feature, a far cry from her screen debut in the racy melodrama-comedy Jamón, Jamón alongside the man who would nearly two decades later become her husband, Javier Bardem. But in Belle Epoque, aged just 18, she played the virginal youngest daughter Luz, in long plaid skirts and shirtwaist outfits, a gingham girl who looks primed to play a pioneer in a Little House on the Prairie remake. Soon, however, she’d find herself cast as a prostitute in an Almodóvar film.
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Costume designers: José María de Cossío
In her first film with Almodóvar, Cruz appears for only eight minutes, but what an eight minutes it is—she goes into labor on a city bus and delivers the film’s protagonist, an auspicious start to her career with the director. Growing up in Spain, the daughter of a hardware store owner and a hairdresser, Cruz obsessively watched movies on her family’s Betamax, but after seeing Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! alone in a theater at age 14, she decided she must be an actress. Specifically, an Almodóvar actress. “Why does he see the world that way? Why does he understand women the way he does? I wanted to know this person who was brave enough to stand up for himself politically,” she has said. Meanwhile, the director was curious about the young woman he’d just seen in her first two breakout films. When he called her up at home, she told Vogue in 2011, she was shocked. “He said, ‘I am going to write you a character that fits you like a glove.” She plays a pregnant prostitute, in a chaste collared coat like a Miuccia design. But it would be her next Almodóvar film in which Prada would figure prominently.
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Costume designers: José María de Cossío, Bina Daigeler
“I think Prada is very good for nuns,” says Cruz’s character, Rosa, in Almodóvar’s screwball drama that won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Rosa wears print dresses and scarlet-red head scarves, appropriately demure against a riotous backdrop—all were a reaction against the mourning clothes the director’s mother was expected to wear for years in real life. To contrast the blackness of his mother’s clothes, the filmmaker has said: “I think I used the colors of my childhood. Technicolor, brilliant explosive colors . . . After losing my mother, I began to think about the origins of my film’s colors.”
Director: Billy Bob Thornton
Costume designer: Doug Hall
“I wanted some people who had that quality of being in the present yet belonging to the past, sort of like ghosts. That’s a poetic way of putting it, but I think it fits,” said Thornton of his decision to cast the Spanish actress in his luminous and raw film of Cormac McCarthy’s modern American Western alongside Matt Damon, Sam Shepard, Bruce Dern, and Henry Thomas. In contrast to the stark, rugged landscape of the film, shot mostly in Texas and New Mexico, and the rough-hewn wardrobes of her costars, Cruz’s look is dreamy and moody, romantic and light, even as she rides horseback through the canyons.
Director: John Madden
Costume designer: Alexandra Byrne
Color also figures prominently in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a wartime romance based on the novel by Louis de Bernières, and set in the Greek island of Cephallonia. Nicolas Cage’s captain is conscripted there in World War II and falls for a local girl, Pelagia, played by Cruz. Her prim collars, floral prints, and aprons are very much of the times, perhaps taking a page from the Von Trapp family’s braided hairstyles and curtain costumes—for these are also floaty, free, hills-are-alive dresses. Deconstructed and viewed in a year when one can wear apron dresses to an awards show, the elements of her wardrobe feel very modern. And, naturally, as the story unfolds in that idyllic world, the braids become undone and the demure collars disappear.
Director: Ted Demme
Costume designer: Mark Bridges
As the volatile girlfriend of a Medellin drug cartel kingpin who then marries one of his friends (Johnny Depp, wearing a mullet), Cruz wore plunging necklines and satin dresses that bore out her character’s dangerous allure and evoked the ’70s-to-early-’80s timeline. Rather than reconstruct the era in new designs, costume designer Mark Bridges headed straight to L.A. shop Resurrection: “Finding the actual vintage stuff is more interesting than our contemporary rehash,” he said, “which doesn’t have the sexiness for it.”
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Costume designer: Bina Daigeler
In upswept hair and smoky eyes, clinging silhouettes, plunging necklines, and color-splashed print, Cruz supremely channels Sophia Loren in Almodóvar’s women-centric tale of the afterlife. The film is suffused with the director and his muse’s signature color—red—radiating intensity, power, passion. Even (and perhaps especially) in aprons, Cruz’s subversively liberating looks exude kitchen sexiness—again, suggesting a sort of deeper strength that belies traditional roles.
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Director: Woody Allen
Costume designer: Sonia Grande
Cruz won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in _Vicky Cristina Barcelon_a, but for costume designer Sonia Grande, Cruz’s beguilingly beautiful, mentally imbalanced character proved a particular challenge—Grande sought to bring out all aspects of her character, yet also make her “visually interesting and contemporary.” She found inspiration in a waitress at her local bar, studying her clothes, her movements; she reminded Grande of Frida Kahlo, as well as bohemian artists she’d personally known, and she sourced pieces in thrift stores. “If a person with good taste goes to a flea market and she’s an artist, she will recognize the good items. Maybe she’ll buy them for 5 cents,” Grande said. “I designed that character from there.” She found the slip dress Cruz wears—now perfectly on cue with this season’s runways—at a Barcelona vintage shop.
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Costume designer: Sonia Grande
If Cruz has another significant muse relationship beyond Almodóvar, it is with costume designer Grande—Broken Embraces was their sixth film working together, on the heels of Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. “Her character had to be beautiful, without us forgetting that elegance can be a direct route to sadness,” said Grande, who also studied the ’90s for inspiration and scoured the personal closets of friends and strangers throughout Europe. Almodóvar happened to have a particularly great collection of men’s clothes from the era; Chanel supplied Cruz’s “incredible” black evening dress with gold chains. For the first part of the film, in which Magdalena is working as a secretary and a phone-sex worker, a gray Alaïa suit from the ’80s was the perfect uniform. Throughout her costume quest, Grande went upscale shopping as well as Dumpster-diving to find the elusive quality she wanted to evoke in the film. “On occasion,” she said, “garbage can take you to paradise.”
Anna Wintour talks runway walks with Derek Zoolander and Hansel Backstage at Valentino: