Frida Kahlo’s style and fashion is as much a part of her legacy as her artwork and has helped turn her into a cultural fixture decades after her death. Next year the largest Frida Kahlo exhibit in the Midwest in 40 years opens in June at the Cleve Carney Art Museum in Glen Ellyn, Illinois featuring 26 original artworks and recreations of some of her iconic Tehuana-inspired dresses. Ahead of the exhibit Kathy Baum, art professor at the College of DuPage located in Glen Ellyn, is hosting a virtual talk on Dec. 17.
The talk will focus on Frida Kahlo’s influence in the world of fashion by exploring concepts including fashion as a form of art, her signature brows, mustache, and braid and how they reveal her image, and how Kahlo’s style is the embodiment of how something is worn is more important than what one wears. The talk will begin with how Kahlo’s clothing was locked away for fifty years and then reopened in 2009 and how the different stages in her life reflected the evolution of her style. On a grander scale they’ll look at her influences in pop culture, high fashion, and print magazine and her relevance today.
“My talk on Frida will cover not only how she influences the fashion world but how her image has been reduced to a ‘pop icon’ and disregards her as a serious artist and creator of her image as a development of her art,” Baum tells Remezcla. “We will cover the resources and styles of her dress and explore how she used it as a form of self-expression.”
“The Fashions of Frida” will go live on Facebook on the McAninch Art’s Center of College of Dupage and the Cleve Carney Museum of Art pages on Thursday, Dec. 17 from 5 – 7 p.m. PST.