The Story with Dick Gordon; 2013-04-08 Journalist Charlie Ornstein; Frida Kahlo's Clothing

I'm Dick Gordon, this is the story. The surrealist artist Andre Breton called the art of Frida Kahlo, a ribbon around a bomb. Frida called it her life, all the physical and emotional pain packed into such a short life. Phoebe Judges here to tell us about some of her belongings which were locked away in her house in Mexico and only recently examined. What's the story here, Phoebe? Well, I think people know Frida Kahlo's artwork. They also know her famous and kind of infamous marriage to Diego Rivera, who was an artist who painted gigantic murals all over Mexico and also across the United States in the 30s and 40s, but Frida had a very distinct style to her. And when she died in 1954, her husband, Diego Rivera, locked all of her belongings in a room in their house. Do you mean her artwork or her personal possessions, her clothes and her jewelry and instructed anyone around him that the room was not to be unlocked for 15 years after his death? He dies a few years later and something happens, messages get crossed and mixed and the room

is not unlocked until 2002. Her things have been kept away for that long. And in the interim, the house has become something of a museum, but there's this locked door in the house. And no one knew what was behind, they open the door and what they find is 300, more than 300 items of Frida's, her clothing and her hair accessories and her jewelry. And also, things, her cast and her body molds, she spent a life that was racked with pain, with surgery, she had many injuries, and they found all of these things as well. There is a curator, her name is Cersei Anastrosa, she's a Mexican woman. And she is a fashion curator who took it upon herself to look through these 300 items and create an exhibition of Frida Kahlo's clothing and also her jewelry. And while Frida was alive, was she known for extravagant clothing or hair ornaments or anything like that or was this really kind of like just peering into someone's clothes

closet? Frida Kahlo, I think, is arguably the most distinctive dresser we've had in the 20th century, people know what she looks like, you might not know her painting. Well, she did self-portraits, right? A lot of self-portraits. A lot of self-portraits, but she had an eyebrow that was incredibly distinctive and she always wore long skirts and colorful shirts, she was always made up. And so if you don't know her paintings, you probably can get an idea of who Frida Kahlo is, the picture in your mind. And so looking back at her work, looking back at her clothing is something that a lot of people are very interested in. Okay, we're going to listen to your conversation with Circe Anastrosa. Frida had a very, very striking image. She costs sensation wherever she went. The look has, it's composed of three parts. You have the headpiece very, very adorned with the ribbons and the plaats and all that. Then you have the torso, which is a short blouse and then very adorned with jewelry.

And then the long skirt. So if you see the construction of Frida Kahlo of the dress itself, that Frida establishes that relationship between the dress and her body, I mean, if she would concentrate all the adornment from the torso of, distracting you from her disabilities. Well, that's, that's the interesting thing is that Frida Kahlo had a life that was filled with pain, physical pain, she had polio when she was a young child and then got into this vicious bus accident when she was a teenager, which very nearly killed her, but also set her on the spiral of surgery upon surgery to correct her spine. And it, it almost seems to me that this way of dress, which has incredibly important cultural significance, matriarchal significance, but also it's a way to dress this body, which causes her so much pain in some way to rebel against it and to say I may be hurting

inside, but it can't stop me. Yes, and this, this, this will inform basically her, her choice of dress because as, as you were saying at the age of six, she has polio and the polio left her with, with a, with the right leg, a shorter than the left leg, I mean, to, till the point that she had that leg, amputated in 53, one year before she died. She describes how she used to wear from three to four socks to level her leg and she describes also how she started using long skirts to hide this imperfection, so making establishing a relationship between dress and her body since a very early age. So she was very conscious how she could use dress to hide her imperfections.

And also within this, this room of, of free to artifacts were, were the casts that she wore, probably, you know, after she was recovering from a surgery, those that bound her, her, torso and, and even those plaster casts, she makes something, she makes of them something, beautiful, something in some way symbolic. She didn't just leave a plaster cast, she was constantly trying to create a statement or beauty around her. Exactly, because then she incorporates, because she had to live with all these corset pieces, most of the corset pieces in the collection are either leather or plaster, and she decorates them, the plaster ones, and I don't know if in the U.S., but in Mexico, the children, when they break one of their arms or legs, and you have a plaster, they usually, we decorate

them, and your friends will draw on it. But this is something she would do as well. Almost as if she was building a, decorating them as a little shirt, you know. And she was always dressed up. I mean, that's the thing about Frida is that there was never a time when she would just throw on a white shirt or an old shirt and say, well, I don't feel good today, I don't, I don't think I'm going to, I don't think I'm going to get really dressed. She always got dressed, and she always looked wonderful. Yeah, she took ages, yeah, to put together all these looks, and one of her very close friends also was describing how she would ask them, should I wear this ribbon or this other ribbon or this skirt? So, yeah, she did put a lot of time and effort because she was very, I guess very glamorous

in that respect, and she wanted to look beautiful. For her, it was waking up in the morning. Some days she would wake up very well, and some days she would feel very, very bad. And those days where she was not, when she was not feeling very well, she will dress up more. The more she was suffering, the more she will adorn. And so you can see, if you see some of her photographs in the later years, she's, she's very, very, very dressed up and, and very adorn. In many of Fritokalo's paintings, she, she is, she's in her painting. She is painting herself depicting herself in different scenes. One of the most famous is, is a painting called, in English, the two Frides.

I wonder if you might describe, and in that painting, she uses the dresses that she's wearing, the two paintings, two pictures of herself side by side in different types of dress. But I wonder if you might describe that famous painting. Well, the painting is very important. She paints this, when she separates from Rivera. They get married in 1929, then they divorce in 1939, and then remarry in 1940. But she paints this specific, the two Frides during the time they are apart. And this is a very, very important painting in terms of the reading of the wardrobe as well, because if you see the two Frides, the two Frides, she is dressed up in, in a European style, and then she's holding the hands of the other Frida, which is the, the Frida

dressed up in the Tijuana attire. She was a mestiza, the daughter of a German Hungarian photographer, Guillermo Calo, El Matilde Calderón, Gonzales, who was herself, I mean, the mother was born in Oaxaca. So she had that mix background in terms of European and Mexican mixture, which the painting also portrays. The interesting thing is that we have these fashion icons who we look at and know that they were kind of groundbreaking and revolutionary in the way they dressed decades and decades ago. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we are going to translate what they did into contemporary fashion today. But that's not the case with Frida Calo, is that her, how she chose to adorn herself, has influenced contemporary fashion.

And we can see that in some of the biggest and fanciest designers out there. Exactly. She was very avant-garde for her time. I mean, the way she decorates her clothes, her boots, I mean, she wouldn't have a boot that was any boot. She was a red boot, adorned with this beautiful Chinese silk embroidery contemporary designer such as Jean-Paul Gaultier, and then later on Ricardo Tichy, for Givenchy, Gaultier interprets her look very interestingly because he's, he's, he's medium-release, the corset and, and Frida were a lot of corset pieces. So in, in 98, he produces this collection called Omash to Frida Calo. And his interpretation is almost like a burlesque punk interpretation of Calo. And he replicates the, her corset as, as the way she's wearing it in the painting, the

broken column, she's wearing this strap corset piece, which is white, but he, he does it in black and style, and styles the model with the very, very heavy head pieces. But it's, it's almost like a, like a punk interpretation, which is fantastic. You mentioned the prosthetic leg, which she, she had her leg amputated in 1953 and died only a year later. But when you see what she had created for her, you, you would never, I don't know if they've ever made a prosthetic like it, describe what she did with her prosthetic leg, how the bottom of that, of that leg where the foot would be. Well, the prosthetic leg is, is probably one of my favorite pieces because really, I mean, you can see with a prosthetic leg, how, how again ahead of her time, she was.

The prosthetic leg has a boot, which is a red book with this green pieces of, of silk. And they are all so refinely embroidered with the most beautiful Chinese embroidery. So she intervenes the boot. And then it has the, the metal, the, the part where she supports her leg. So whenever she was walking again with that leg, you would see, you wouldn't be able to tell that that boot is what's behind her, you know, underneath her skirt. I mean, like she didn't have half of the leg, let's say. It kind of, it kind of, the boot is so beautifully decorated that you forget that this is masking half a leg because you're drawn to this intricate design on it. Exactly, exactly that, that at the end of the day, she will, remember, she will always

wear these long scarves to hide her legs, to distract the viewer from her legs all the time. But while wearing this prosthetic leg, you will also notice that she didn't even had, you know, that she didn't, that she had lost half of her leg because then she would walk graciously and beautifully the same way when she had the whole leg. What was it like to touch and hold all of these items? I mean, they've been locked up for more than 50 years. Did they smell like Frida? We don't know what Frida smelled like, but I imagine she wore perfume. Yeah, they definitely, these items have, and this is something what happens with clothing and probably one of the reasons why I decided to specialize in fashion curation because garments are very, very powerful tools for social cultural interpretation.

These objects and these garments tell you so much about the wearer, about the personality of the wearer, and yes, the items do have a smell. They don't necessarily smell of perfume, but they do have like, how to describe the smell. It's hair, it's a beautiful smell, it's something very unique of her skin. And it must be emotional to stand with all of these things around her. We have such iconic pictures of Frida Kahlo, ones that I think whether you know her art work or not, you see a picture of this woman and you say that's Frida.

To be around the clothes that really shaped that image of her seems like it might have been a kind of an emotional experience. And when we were working the research team at the museum, when we were working with all these items, we had very happy moments, even as if you feel the presence of the person, even as if she was there, we had very, very happy moments when looking at all her colorful garments. But for example, when we were revising all her herotopetic devices or her hospital items more or direct to her illness, those objects, all her medicines, we would have people in the team living the room because it was so intense, it was really, really, it was really hard.

So people would go out to, you know, to get fresh air and then recover and then come back because it was very, very intense and those you can feel the sadness around it is very, very strong. That's Phoebe Judge talking with Circe Anastrosa. Her exhibition on Frida Kahlo's clothing called Smoke and Mirrors is on display at the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City through this coming November. I'm Dick Gordon, this is the story. Support for the story comes from Red Hat, an enterprise open source company that works

within communities to create technology the open source way, redhat.com. The story is a production of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC, a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And this is APM, American Public Media.