Why Frida Kahlo's fashion was just as political as her art

Why Frida Kahlo's fashion was just as political as her art
Katherine Ashenburg
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Saturday, Dec. 08 2012, 12:01 AM EST
Last updated Saturday, Dec. 08 2012, 12:01 AM EST
Globe Unlimited

When Frida Kahlo died in 1954, Diego Rivera locked up his wife’s clothes in her bathroom. The next year, he donated their Mexico City house and its contents, including her collections of obstetrical textbooks, dolls, paintings and folk art, to the Mexican people for a museum. But Kahlo’s clothes – more than 300 of the shawls, square-shaped blouses and long, flouncy skirts with which she concocted her famous look – remained under lock and key. They were, apparently, too intimate, too redolent, too Frida to display.

For Rivera, the clothes may also have been too Frida-and-Diego, a potent reminder of the two painters’ fractious, symbiotic relationship and shared values. Visitors to the Art Gallery of Ontario’s current exhibition about the pair, Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting, which runs until Jan. 20, can parse that relationship through the more than 80 works and 60 photographs on display. They also afford a ring-side seat on Kahlo’s meticulous, intense personal style.

Although Kahlo forged her own distinctive look, it was inspired significantly by the couple’s commitment to the indigenous people and folk traditions of Mexico. But while Rivera enjoyed pointing out Kahlo’s un-bourgeois, “primitive” personality, she had a relatively small claim to being indigenous. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, was a German-born Hungarian Jewish photographer. Her mother, Matilde Calderon, who wore flapper dresses and other European styles, was half Spanish, half indigenous. As a teenager, Kahlo slicked her hair back and wore a man’s suit for a family portrait – an early example of her willingness to dress a part – but mostly she wore conventional 1920s styles.

That changed when she met Rivera, whose artistic set championed mexicanidad, the glorification of all things indigenous. Kahlo, a novice painter and 20 years younger than her famous partner, adopted the same stance, but in her own way. She began collecting long skirts, the rectangular blouses (called huipiles) woven on a backstrap loom, the fringed stoles (or rebozos) that could transport a baby and wrap a woman in mysterious glamour. Kahlo’s jewellery combined both sides of her heritage, typically with colonial silver earrings and chunky pre-Columbian necklaces of jade or onyx. She made her hair into a sculptural element, braiding it with thick wool, crowning it with ribbons or flowers. Never a purist, she mixed styles and clothes from different regions with a canny eye. Other women wore folk dress occasionally, just as well-dressed Mexican women today sometimes wear a rebozo or an embroidered blouse, but Kahlo rarely wore anything else.

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