What Frida Kahlo's style choices mean to a fashion historian

I'm Raisa Britannia I'm a fashion historian and a faculty member in the history of art department at the Fashion Institute of Technology today I will be talking about self-portrait with cropped Hair by Frida Kahlo from 1940. what first drew me to this work was the fact that it is such an anomaly in Frida kahlo's visual Legacy Frida Kahlo is an indisputable style icon in her own right and it's almost too bad that we think of her only in one way so when you think about Frida Kahlo there is a very distinctive look that might pop into your head and she is typically thought of as wearing her traditional Mexican attire that Drew from the traditions of tejuana dress so you think of her wearing these embroidered weeple blouses these long flowing skirts these colorful rebozos and it is a look that is hyper feminine and very atypical for what was being worn by most of the Western World in 1940. in this painting Frida Kahlo has depicted herself seated wearing a man's suit in her right hand she holds a pair of scissors and in her left hand she holds a braid of hair there is additional hair strewn around her on the floor and we see that she has cropped her hair short in a style that is more traditionally masculine and although she has stripped herself of the markers of femininity associated with her clothing and her hair styling there are still subtle markers of femininity when you do a closer reading you see that she wears a dangling earring and if you zoom in on her left foot you can see that she's wearing a heeled shoe and if you look even closer at her face you can see that she is in fact wearing makeup and makeup was such an important part of Frida kahlo's identity it's said that she never allowed herself to be seen without lipstick she has depicted herself wearing a man's suit and it is one that is very similar to those worn by her husband fellow Mexican painter Diego Rivera and this was painted in 1940 shortly after Kalo and Rivera got a divorce this painting captures her grief and her heartbreak at this very particular moment in her life the way she has chosen to dress herself in this painting reveals something raw and something very true about her essence of the 143 paintings attributed to Frida Kahlo 55 of them are self-portraits that is because she often considered herself her own muse

Channel: The Museum of Modern Art

Views: 20,706

Keywords: moma, museum of modern art, new york, art, artist, museum, contemporary

Id: n7suE3-0Z6g

Length: 3min 41sec (221 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 13 2023