Vanishing Acts: Mexicanness and Frida Kahlo’s “Ethnic” Fashions

• In Event: Beyond Bodies, Images, and Texts: Re-visioning Cultural Trends in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

This paper examines the shifting meanings of a familiar icon of mexicanidad: Frida Kahlo and the Tehuana ethnic dress known as her trademark look. It analyzes "Appearances Can Deceive: The Dresses of Frida Kahlo," the first exhibit of the artist’s recently recovered wardrobe on view at the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City from 2012-2014. Organized around the themes of disability and ethnicity, the exhibit included Kahlo’s medical corsets and prosthetics, as well as contemporary fashions inspired by the artist. This paper situates Kahlo’s style in the politics of post-revolutionary Mexico and explores how disability complicated Kahlo’s relationship to ethnic dress and fashion. It examines the recent exhibit in dialogue with Kahlo’s "My Dress Hangs There" (1933), a work that reflects on modernity and national identity through the presentation of a disembodied Tehuana dress in tense proximity to Mae West’s image. Engaging the exhibit’s presentation of the artist as a returning “specter” in contemporary fashion, this paper inquires about the motif of the disembodied garment in the imaginary of Mexican national identity in the twenty-first century, illustrating the ways history inscribes itself on fashion despite its pretensions of constant innovation.

Author

• Alba F Aragón, Bridgewater State University