“F
rida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving,” on view at the Brooklyn Museum, is the largest American exhibition in ten years devoted to the iconic Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo. The exhibition is the first in the United States to display a collection of her personal belongings, including clothes, cosmetics, accessories, and medical devices, alongside her paintings. As these personal artifacts reveal, Kahlo often crafted her appearance and public identity to reflect her cultural heritage and political beliefs. A streetcar accident in 1925 left Kahlo in a lifetime of pain, necessitating her to wear corsets and leg braces, included in the exhibition. “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving” brings attention to the personal experiences of Kahlo’s life, allowing the audience to better understand her art and to begin to imagine themselves in the shoes of Kahlo.
The first room of the exhibition introduces Kahlo’s family background and ethnic heritage. Born to a German father and a Mexican mother of Spanish and Native American (mestiza) descent from Oaxaca, Mexico, Kahlo explored her identity by frequently depicting her ancestry as binary opposites in her art (Fig. 1). Although Kahlo never visited the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a municipality in the southeast of Oaxaca, Kahlo incorporated the traditional Tehuana style in her wardrobe. The Museo Frida Kahlo describes the elements of the signature Tehuana dress on Google Arts and Culture (Fig. 2):
“The Tehuana dress is the pure representation of that meeting – the geometric focus on the heavily adorned upper body, the short square chain stitch blouses and the gender political statements that the dress implies. Frida and the Tehuana come together in a perfect union of identity, beauty and design.”
The Tehuana dress consists of the upper garment, the huipil, and a long colorful skirt, which covers much of the body. A huipil is a loose-fitting blouse, traditional in Mexico and Central America, composed of cotton and elaborate embroidery motifs on necklines, sleeve openings, and hem (Fig. 3). The huipil was regularly worn by Kahlo likely because of the effects it would bring–its geometric, short square construction helped her to look taller and avoided discomfort when seated. Alba F. Aragón in Uninhabited Dresses: Frida Kahlo, from Icon of Mexico to Fashion Muse (2014) explains the symbolic purpose of the huipil:
“The Tehuana’s design qualities further reinforce that impression: the unfitted huipil does not suggest a sensual, perishable body of curves and hollows. Instead, its geometry adorns an absent, thus impenetrable, body, in an apparent refusal of West’s brand of feminine seduction and the masculine gaze it implies.” (523)
