Being Frida
With London’s V&A about to open a major retrospective on Frida Kahlo, Marianna Cerini seeks the essence and legacy of the influential Mexican artist and feminist icon
We go in search of the essence and legacy of the influential Mexican artist Frida Kahlo
Mexico City’s Blue House, the home Frida Kahlo shared with her muralist husband, Diego Rivera, is a moving celebration of the life and work of the influential Mexican, one of the most acclaimed artists and feminist trailblazers of the 20th century. Kahlo’s personal belongings lie seemingly untouched in the rooms in which she lived her creative, tumultuous and all-too-short life. Downstairs, her wardrobe is on display behind glass cabinets. There are colourful, bright dresses and sweeping, full-circle skirts, maxi shawls in boisterous prints, and necklaces inspired by Mexican folk craft. And there are more sombre items: body casts and corsets, which Kahlo had to wear for the rest of her life after a near-fatal bus crash left her heavily debilitated when she was 18, and a prosthetic leg she decorated with an embroidered red lace-up boot and a bell, which Kahlo had to use after losing her leg to gangrene in 1953.
Next month, some 200 of these revealing artefacts will be leaving Mexico for the first time, to be shown at the V&A in London in a major retrospective—frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up. On display will be make-up, clothes and jewellery, but also photographs, intimate objects and that defiant prosthetic leg. It will be “a picture of Frida’s life—the way she constructed her identity through the actual objects,” co-curator Claire Wilcox, senior curator of fashion at the V&A, told Dazed magazine. It will also poignantly reveal the tight intersection of style, tradition and progressivism that has come to define the influential visionary. “Kahlo created her own distinctive style,” says the exhibition’s other curator, Circe Henestrosa, head of the school of fashion at Singapore’s Lasalle College of the Arts. “As a bohemian artist, a Tehuana, a hybrid persona, she used art and dress to express herself.”
The exhibition couldn’t be better timed. Kahlo has long been hailed as a fashion icon and has inspired a number of designers, including Jean-paul Gaultier in 1998, Rei Kawakubo in 2012, and Roland Mouret and Cushnie et Ochs this past spring, as well as Gucci, Riccardo Tisci’s Givenchy, Burberry, and Dolce & Gabbana over various seasons.
But in recent years, Kahlo’s influence has also reverberated beyond high fashion, into the realms of the high street and social media. Her work has appeared on anything from tees to plaids, candles and phone covers, Tumblr and Instagram. In March, to mark International Women’s Day, Mattel released a Frida Barbie, one of a new collection depicting inspirational women. Whether one approves of the commodification, there’s no doubt that the Mexican artist has become an inspiring cult figure for women everywhere, even more so in the #Metoo era. Putting her personal objects on such a
prominent stage outside Mexico is bound to add to the buzz around her. “I think Kahlo’s powerful style is as integral to her myth as her paintings,” Henestrosa says. “It is her construction of identity through her ethnicity, her disability, her political beliefs and her art that makes her such a compelling and relevant icon today.”
Until 2004, none of the objects in the show had seen the light of day. After Kahlo died in 1954 at the age of 47, Rivera locked her belongings in her bathroom and dressing room at the Blue House, ordering that they remained sealed until after his death. He died in 1957, but it was another 47 years before the contents were unsealed.
That moment is described in the book Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress: The Fashion of Frida Kahlo by restorers Denise and Magdalena Rosenzweig: “Inside, a strong smell, halfacrid, half-sweet, pervaded the air, a mixture of dampness, medicines, dust and time.” Her wardrobe—“a simple piece painted white and weathered by time”—is depicted as holding “precious treasures.” The items represented the essence of Kahlo’s iconography today, a symbolic uniform of the artist’s mixed heritage—kahlo was a mestizaje, of European and Mexican background—eclectic attitudes and hybrid aesthetics.
Kahlo was a multifaceted woman. A feminist ahead of her times, she lived crippled by chronic pain, incapable of carrying a child because of her physical disabilities but desperately yearning for one. She was bisexual, progressive and revolutionary both in her politics and dreamlike, mystically charged paintings. She was also acutely aware of how powerful image and fashion can be.
Before the concept was even a thing, she made herself an unmistakeably recognisable brand. Her wardrobe was a studied part of it—and “from a very young age,” Henestrosa says. “For example, as a result of polio at the age of 6, she was left with a withered and shorter right leg, which led her to choose long skirts. She also began wearing three or four socks on her thinner calf and wore shoes with a built-up heel to mask her asymmetry,” the curator adds.
The skirts and intricately embroidered blouses, the heavy jewellery and braided flowers, and the famous monobrow, which she highlighted with eyeliner, were all conscious choices by the artist to make an impression but also to hide her woes— physical and psychological. “She had a truly unconventional spirit,” Henestrosa says. “She never let her disabilities and personal circumstances define her. She defined who she was in her own terms.” To that end, she played a brilliant game of perceptions.
The assortment of references she relied on when dressing—and in making her art— helped her hone that game. Kahlo mixed male and female details (she famously had a penchant for suits), European fabrics and traditional Mexican garments. She was particularly enamoured of the Tehuana dress from a matriarchal culture in the Tehuantepec region of the state of Oaxaca.
“The Tehuana traditional dress was something she fused with and wore like a second skin,” Henestrosa says. “She saw it as a strong symbol of female power and independence, as well as one of great feminine beauty.” Composed of a headpiece, a huipil (short blouse) and a long skirt, the ensemble had an almost theatrical effect—exactly what Kahlo wanted. It also served as a clever way to conceal her fragile body, weakened by polio and the bus crash.
“Kahlo was able to perceive the semiotic quality of her clothing,” Henestrosa says. “Through the use of traditional Mexican dresses to style herself, Kahlo dealt with her life, her political views, her health struggles, her accident, her turbulent marriage and her inability to have children.” The V&A exhibitions includes 22 of these dresses, as well as photographs and self-portraits showing Kahlo in them.
Corsets the artist had to wear as a result of her physical woes, on display as well, became part of her style persona, too. Kahlo painted them, adding symbols and fragments of scenes on their surfaces—one features a hammer and sickle, reflecting her communist views—turning them into essential parts of her wardrobe.
As Susana Martínez Vidal, the author of Frida Kahlo: Fashion as the Art of Being, told The Observer, Kahlo “defined one of fashion’s magic words—attitude.” She moulded her clothes to fit her own narrative, to simultaneously enhance her personality and shun her vulnerabilities, and to create what is a colourful, unapologetically bold manifestation of femininity, gender, heritage and identity. “Her striking image helps people connect with her,” Henestrosa says. “As [art historian] Hayden Herrera has said, although her paintings record specific moments in her life, all who view them feel Frida is speaking directly to them.”