While Frida Kahlo is known for her bright and highly personal self-portraits, her role as a style icon is not to be dismissed. Most women of the 1930s embraced form-fitting dresses, coiffed hairdos, and dainty, pencil-thin eyebrows. Kahlo preferred to make appearances wearing ribbons, full skirts, bold jewelry, loose peasant blouses with vivid embroidery, and her signature untamed eyebrows.
A full collection from Kahlo’s wardrobe will go on display at the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City beginning November 22nd. Sponsored by Vogue Mexico, Appearance Can Be Deceiving: The Dresses of Frida Kahlo will include jewelry, shoes, and clothes that had been locked away in the artist’s armoires for almost 50 years.
Smelling of cigarette smoke and perfume and stained from painting, Kahlo’s clothing served as an armor of sorts. Kahlo’s life was rife with pain, both emotional and physical. Polio left one of her legs thinner and weaker than the other, a bus accident maimed her when she was only 18, she suffered multiple miscarriages, and endured a tumultuous marriage with the Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera. Kahlo coped with all of these experiences in her painting as well as through her dress. Her long, full skirts covered her debilitated leg and her loose blouses covered the rigid corsets she wore for back pain.
When Kahlo died in 1954, Rivera ordered that her clothes be locked up for 15 years. After his death three years later, art collector Dolores Olmedo became the manager of his and Kahlo’s houses and refuses to allow access to Kahlo’s letters, clothes, jewelry, and photographs. They were not unlocked until Olmedo’s death in 2004.
Highlights from Appearances Can Be Deceiving include the white corset Kahlo wore in the self-portrait The Broken Column and an earring that was a gift from Pablo Picasso and was featured in a self-portrait from the 1940s. The mate has not been found. A Tehuana dress, named after Indian women of that region, was Kahlo’s signature piece of clothing. Worn with large gold earrings and flowers braided into her hair, the dress is featured in many self-portraits.
