Frida Kahlo’s Clothes

While renovating Casa Azul (Blue House), the home-turned museum of Frida Kahlo located in the Coyoacan neighborhood of Mexico City, administrators of the museum were surprised to make a remarkable find. When work began on restoring the private areas of the home/museum… a huge wardrobe of 180 articles of clothing were uncovered. Many of the costumes found were depicted in Kahlo’s famous self-portraits, and the collection includes shawls, shoes, and the indigenous jewelry she was so well known for wearing. Also found were the pair of earrings given to Kahlo as a gift from Pablo Picasso. Kahlo famously showed off Picasso’s offering in a self-portrait that featured the ornaments shaped like tiny hands.

Many of Kahlo’s trademark dresses are from the state of Oaxaca, where seamstresses in Tehuantepec patterned clothes following ancient Zapotec Indian traditions… a craft carried on in the present. Of course, Kahlo and her famous husband Diego Rivera, like many Mexican artists of the day, were extremely interested in and inspired by the Aztec, Mayan, and Olmec civilizations that once ruled the country. These progressive minded artists sought to break the ties to European culture and establish an authentic Mexican culture based on indigenous foundations. While today people may regard Kahlo’s hand-embroidered Indian dresses and pre-Columbian jewelry as fashionable… it is noteworthy to remember that when she wore her Tehuana dresses she was defying the bourgeois conventions of Mexico’s elites, who preferred European aesthetics over anything Mexican.

Despite the mainstreaming and commercialization of Frida Kahlo, she remains an important figure for many reasons. Her artistic creations came to be world renown, attracting the attention of artists around the world, including the founder of surrealism, André Breton. Kahlo was a fierce nationalist and a communist, and her militant politics led her to champion the poor throughout her life. Her last public act was to take part in a demonstration in opposition to the US backed coup in Guatemala, despite the fact that she was suffering from pneumonia. She died eleven days later in 1954 at the age of 47. Perhaps above all else, she is remembered for her inner strength and resolve, which has served as an inspiration to women all over the world. As her famous husband put it so eloquently, "She is the first woman in the history of art to treat, with absolute and uncompromising honesty… one might even say with impassive cruelty, those general and specific themes which exclusively affect women."

Casa Azul is the house where Frida Kahlo was born and died. Diego Rivera arranged to have all of Kahlo’s possessions recovered in her home to remain on display there, making the recently discovered artifacts a part of the museum’s permanent collection. Today Casa Azul is one of Mexico’s most-visited museums, and its officials are looking to a special exhibit of the newly discovered clothes to take place a year from now. When that exhibit takes place, you can be sure that Xispas will be writing about it. (posted by Mark Vallen)