Appearances Can Be Deceiving

Appearances Can Be Deceiving: Frida Kahlo’s Wardrobe displays these objects for the very first time and is a study of Kahlo’s construction of her own identity. The exhibition focuses on the construction of Kahlo’s style through disability, tradition, fashion and dress. It also shows how Kahlo’s personal style remains a source of inspiration for international artists and fashion designers.

Canadian-type crutches, designed for patients with poliomyelitis diseases, ca. 1954.

Right metal prosthetic leg lined in leather with red leather boot embroidered with Chinese motifs worked in silk thread. Two metal bells hang on a salmon coloured ribbon, 1953.

Frida’s use of this traditional dress to strengthen her identity, reafirming her political beliefs, and concealing her imperfections, also built on her own sense of heritage and personal history.

The adornment of the Tehuana dress is centred around the upper part of the body. Chain stitch blouses, flowers, highly decorated jewelry, earrings, necklaces and rings will always be concentrated from the torso up, obliging the viewer to focus on Frida's upper body and providing her with the opportunity to edit and fragment herself, distracting the viewer from her legs and lower part of her body.
The huipil, due to its geometric short square construction, would help her to look taller and, when she was seated, allowed the fabric not to bunch up around her waist, thereby avoiding discomfort or drawing attention to itself.

Many designers have taken this as their starting point for
interpreting Kahlo: the corset, her corset, as the perfect symbol of
her physical fragility and an ally to her resilient character. The styling is transferred to fashionable clothing, borrowing
from Kahlo’s use of the corset as medical contraption and as effort
to stylize and incorporate it. Rei Kawakubo, Dai Rees and Jean
Paul Gaultier use the idiosyncrasies of their own style to produce
carefully detailed pieces in the same way Kahlo created her
paintings at once personal and meticulously produced. 

Jean Paul Gaultier.
The Freckles, orthopedic corset in salmon worn over a short dress with a flesh colored silk ruffle printed with with brown freckles. Spring / Summer 2004.

These designers have drafted parallels between fashion and disability, marrying these ideas through the haunting image of Kahlo’s corset in the avant-garde.1
The designers take their own stance on what is of value in Kahlo’s image, a perfect example of post modernist deconstruction and, in the case of Gaultier by creating a kind of burlesque exoticism, while for Kawakubo the meaning has an almost religious connotation. For Rees it is about the human anatomy.

1 Judith Clark, Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back, Londres, V&A Publications, 2004, p. 40.

Dai Rees.
Corset bodice in natural tanned leather and waxed cotton constructed from a flat a pattern and hand shaped wet moulding (Cuir Bouilli), 2012

Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy

Kahlo’s style is celebrated as contemporary and relevant. Frida’s sense of self, reinterpreted through her family traditions and her disability, is clearly shown in Tisci's collection, her tormented memory represented through his materials and motifs. Flowers in lace make allusion to tradition, both as symbols of life and death; the memory of a skeletal silhouette in fine embroidery with the pelvis uncovered reminds us of the artist’s lifelong battle with
spinal pain, but also to her accident - it was then that Kahlo was left with the impossibility of conceiving a child. The jackets look like wings, the wings of a dove that recurred in Kahlo’s work, especially when in the throes of pain she would cling on to the hope of being able to escape from her own body.

Givenchy Haute Couture by Riccardo Tisci.

La Llorada, jumpsuit in blush coloured tulle embroidered with lace and silk satin motifs worn with a flesh coloured bodysuit in stretch tulle embroidered with lace appliqués and a jacket in silk gazar embroidered with matching hand cut silk fringes. Fall / Winter 2010.