Armando Valdés Peza (May 24, 1907 - July 1, 1970) was a fashion designer, actor and writer.
Queer Places:
Windsor Apartments, Calle 2 de Abril, Centro Histórico de la Cdad. de México, Guerrero, 06300 Ciudad de México, CDMX
Armando Valdés Peza (May 24, 1907 - July 1, 1970) was a fashion designer, actor and writer.
Armando was the son of Pedro Valdes Fraga, violinist, and María Peza Echegaray, daughter of the poet Juan de Dios Peza. Between 1944 and 1946 he returned from Hollywood. Friend of Salvador Novo, with whom he shared many anecdotes of the socialite, he was called by the Chronicler "Mandy".
In the 1950s, apartments that were designed for singles and couples attracted gay men. Demand for small apartments grew by the mid-1950s, with many new residential projects offering smaller units. The Unidad Habitacional Santa Fe, which opened in 1956, configured some 20 per cent of its space as one-bedroom and studio flats. Architects’ illustrations and floor plans envisioned different types of family occupying these apartments, with the one-bedroom units often holding a full-size bed (for a bachelor or a couple), or twin beds (for roommates), and living rooms capable of seating five individuals and dining space for four. Studio apartments were configured with a sleeping alcove accommodating a full-size bed; a living room with two chairs and a sofa; and a kitchenette with a small table and two chairs. These flats attracted middle- and lower-middle-class individuals – clerks, minor functionaries and teachers – who paid less than 25 per cent of their monthly income in rent. In response to demand for small modern apartments, private investors developed affordable studio apartments that could be leased for as little as $100 pesos per month, such as Jorge Rubio’s Windsor Apartments. Conceived as a luxury hotel in the 1940s to lodge touring orchestras, opera and ballet companies performing at the Bellas Artes Theatre, the Windsor was converted into apartments in the 1950s, with small kitchenettes concealed behind a partition wall and a closet separating the bathroom from the multifunction main room. These units attracted gay professionals and artists, including couturier Armando Valdés Peza and playwright Sergio Magaña. Although spartan by bourgeois standards, apartments such as these transformed the lives of a man like Magana, giving him a home close to the theatres where he worked, allowing him to host friends and co-workers and giving him the type of privacy he lacked as a rural migrant living in tenements with his family.
Armando Valdés Peza was the head designer of María Félix, Dolores del Río and Miroslava among other celebrities. He was an inseparable friend of La Doña, his confidant on many occasions. Valdés Peza, was in charge of the column "Crónicas de México", as a social chronicler in El Universal, which he inherited from Luis G. Basurto when this last died. As an actor, he had a significant role in Wuthering Heights (1946) and Cyrano among others.
He was in charge of the costumes of films such as: Alguien nos quiere matar (1970), Matrimonio y sexo (1965), Amor de adolescente (1964), He matado a un hombre (1962), Atrás de las nubes (1962), La fièvre monte à El Pao (1959), Doña Diabla (1950), La bien pagada (1948), Enamorada (1946). El gran Makakikus (1944), La corte de faraón (1944), México de mis recuerdos (1944), María Candelaria (1944), El peñón de las ánimas (1942), Yo baile con Don Porfirio and Las Abandonadas among others.
He made the costumes for the following plays: "Road to Rome" (1959), The Fan of Lady Windemere (1958), The Lady of Hearts (1961), Wuthering Heights (1946), With you bread and onion.
Indicative of the relative freedom with which well-heeled homosexuals led their lives in Mexico City are the cases of the children of multimillionaire entrepreneurs and celebrities chronicled in society pages. Alberto Maus Santander, heir to a tobacco and real estate fortune, grew up in a progressive and cosmopolitan home. Born in 1925, he came of age in the 1940s, when prominent gays like Salvador Novo and Roberto Montenegro frequently visited his family. Alberto – known to everyone as Beto – dabbled in the arts and dreamed of studying abroad. In preparation, over the spring of 1960, he watched his figure and dieted, partaking only of steak and salad. Novo announced in his weekly column on 5 November 1960 that Beto planned to study interior decoration in Paris. Novo further noted ‘in fact, his family is to dine in the home of the young man who is to accompany Beto to Paris’. After his father’s death left him a substantial inheritance, Beto left the family home to install himself in a modern high-rise bachelor’s apartment on Insurgentes Avenue. Novo’s readers followed his move, his interest in interior design and learned of his talented cooking and entertaining.
Beto’s elegant eighth-floor apartment was two floors above that of his close friend and classmate Enrique Álvarez Félix, sole son of famed actress María Félix. ‘Quique’ to his friends, Álvarez Félix lived in a comfortable flat. It was ‘modern’, Novo noted, ‘but without the odd furniture that young people prefer’. Green velvet coverings on the sofas and chairs matched the green carpet and contrasted with the straw-coloured wallpaper. Many antiques, on loan from his mother’s Hacienda de Catipoato, softened the modern lines of the apartment’s finishings. Álvarez Félix frequently entertained at home with the help of his mother and her trusted confidante, the gay designer Armando Valdés Peza. Newspaper columns enumerated his guests, surreptitiously recording the unspoken intimacy of homosexual couples named among married heterosexual couples, as occurred in 1959, when Novo noted in his column that television producer Ernesto Alonso arrived with Angel Fernandez Vinas. Decades later, it was revealed that Alonso and Fernandez were lifelong companions, and had adopted two children whom they raised as their own, in an effort to construct an image of normalcy that would keep viewers of his television programmes from being scandalised by his homosexuality.
In the early 1950s, Valdés Peza partnered with actress Rita Macedo to open a fashion house in Mexico City's Colonia Juárez . [ 5 ] Casa Valdés Peza dressed distinguished personalities from the show and from Mexican society.
In addition to being the fashion designer of the stars and high society of his time, his fame was such that it was said that those who competed and triumphed in the Opera of Fine Arts were: Trixi and Valdéz Plaza. Armando, made the costumes of different plays. Armando died at home of a fulminant heart attack. He was veiled in chapel 20 of Gaiossus, Sullivan, his body was cremated.
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