Frida Kahlo in the book "100 dresses that shocked the world" by Massimilano Capella
23 April 2025
In this book available in Italian and edited by 24 ORE Cultura 2024, the author collects emblematic examples in which fashion disintegrated conventions. What is striking, between the folds of the hundred profiles traced by Capella, is that the ‘upheaval’ comes from an individual gesture, from a choice that disrupts the system, often made by a woman.
The message is clear: clothing is never just clothing. It can be language, a weapon, a proclamation. It has as many functions as the possible intentions with which it is worn, which is why its status goes beyond inorganic matter because, once in contact with the body, it merges with the organic, acquiring its characterising properties. The dressed body can reshape narratives. It is the female body that uses clothing to dissent from imposed roles.
In 1942, Vogue America dedicated an editorial to Frida Kahlo entitled Local Colour Mexican, celebrating her style outside Western fashions and standards. Capella recalls how Frida's image - with her traditional Tehuana dresses, perfumes, colours, rebozos - seduced even the American bourgeoisie, fascinated by the ‘breath of Mexican air’ brought by a woman who, by aesthetic and political choice, refused to give in to the fashion of the moment.
Dress, for Frida, is neither disguise nor folklore, but a position statement. Kahlo has a public image codified according to her culture, used, at the same time, as a social custom and very personal clothing: a system-outfit composed of the canvas tunic with geometric huipil pattern, the voluminous heunaga skirt, the holans lace crown, the huraces sandals, all wrapped up in the iconic rebozo, the scarf-container, of objects and babies. For Frida, dress is identity, resistance, politics. Her traditional clothes are not folklore, but a radical choice, an affiliation with indigenous women and a rejection of the dictates of Western fashion. Frida does not follow time: she wears it. Through clothes and accessories, Frida imposes a style that is both personal and collective, in which individual independence coincides with cultural memory and political solidarity. It is an exemplary case in which fashion is not only an expression of the self, but a stance in the world.
Taken from an article by Bianca Terracciano (in Italian).
Massimiliano Capella - Art and Fashion Historian, author, curator and museum director, he is particularly interested in the relations between visual arts, fashion and performing arts.
The book is available at the link below.
