Frida Kahlo

My skirts with their lace flounces

and the antique blouse I always

wore xxxxxxxxx paint

the absent portrait of only one person.

Frida Kahlo, “Letter to Jacqueline Lamba,” The Diary of Frida Kahlo.

Frida’s Tehuana costume became so much a part of her persona that sometimes she painted it devoid of owner...Frida knew this magic power of clothes to substitute for their owner;  in her diary she wrote that Tehuana costume made ‘the absent portrait of only one person’—her absent self.” Hayden Herrera, Frida:  A Biography. 

The clothes of Frida Kahlo were, nevertheless, more than a second skin.  She said it herself:  The were a manner of dressing for paradise, of preparing for death...Her luxurious dresses hid her broken body;  they also permitted her to act in a ceremony of ceremonies, a dressing and undressing of herself as laborious, regal, and ritualistic as those of the Emperor Montezuma, who was helped by several dozen handmaidens. Carlos Fuentes, Introduction, The Diary of Frida Kahlo.

Many of the most captivating photos of Frida Kahlo were taken by Nicholas Muray. A native of Hungary, Muray was a famous portrait photographer at the turn of the century. I love the way the two have collaborated to make Kahlo a flower in the top portrait: the floral design of the wallpaper, flowers in her hair and on her dress form a stunning combination. Kahlo's Tehuana dresses are one of the hallmarks of herstyle.Tehuantepec is a region in southern Mexico. The Tehuana dresses consisted of a blouse (called "Huipil") and a long skirt. Kahlo also paid close attention to her accessories, often wearing elaborately crafted jewelry, and to arrangement of her hair, here beautifully adorned with flowers or ribbons. The Casa Azul, her home in Mexico, has some of her of clothing on display. An exhibition last year in Baden-Baden featured Kahlo's paintings and Tehuana dresses.

Yukio Mishima

The River of Body

This is a young River that suddenly began flowing at the midpoint of my life.  I had been dissatisfied for quite some time by the fact that my invisible spirit alone could create tangible visions of beauty.  Why could not I myself be something visibly beautiful and worthy of being looked at?  For this purpose I had to make my body beautiful.

            When at last I came to own such a body, I wanted to display it to everyone, to show it off and to let it move in front of every eye, just like a child with a new toy.  My body became for me like a fashionable sports car for its proud owner.  In it I drove on many highways to new places.  Views I had never seen before opened up for me and enriched my experience.

            But the body is doomed to decay, just like the complicated motor of a car.  I for one do not, will not, accept such a doom.  This means that I do not accept the course of Nature.  I know I am going against Nature;  I know I have forced my body onto the most destructive path of all. Henry Scott-Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima, Catalogue to the Tobu Exhibition

“Muscles, I found, were strength as well as form, and each complex of muscles was subtly responsible for the direction in which its own strength was exerted, much as though they were rays of light given the form of flesh.  Nothing  could have accorded better with the definition of a work of art that I had long cherished than this concept of form enfolding strength, coupled with the idea that a work should be organic, radiating rays of light in all directions.  The muscles that I thus created were at one and the same time simple existence and works of art.”  Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel.

 Self-styling is not always about clothes.  I love the way Mishima flaunts his buffness like a fashionable sports car.  He devoted himself to body building long before it became a trend. That he did so in a society with little tradition in this arena is all the more remarkable.

Miles Davis

          Before his performance, Mr. Davis will wear a single-breasted (one button) beige pongee suit, combining the French and Italian influence on pants and jacket.  When Mr. Davis is playing on stage, he will be wearing a double-breasted gray imported silk (two buttons) featuring only two pockets to create an extra slim line.

         

          After his performance, Miles will relax in a pink, single-breasted seersucker jacket with matching pants, hand-made loafers of doeskin, and white sports shirt worn with a pink silk square.  Press release for Randall Island Jazz Festival, 1961.

 I was changing my attitude about a lot of things, like the look of my wardrobe.  I was working all these clubs where there was a lot of smoke, and it would get in the fabric of my suits.  Plus, everyone was starting to dress a little looser at concerts, at least the rock musicians were, and that might have affected me.  Everybody was into blackness, you know, the black consciousness movement, and so a lot of African and Indian fabrics were being worn.  I started wearing African dashikis and robes and looser clothing plus a lot of Indian tops by a guy named Hernando, who was from Argentina and who had a place in Greenwich Village.  That’s where Jimi Hendrix bought most of his clothes.  So I started buying wraparound Indian shirts from him, patch suede pants from a black designer named Steven Burrows, and shoes from a place in London called Chelsea Cobblers...I had moved away from the cool Brooks Brothers look and into this other thing, which for me was more what was happening with the times.  I found I could move around on the stage much better.  I wanted to move on stage, play in different places, because there are areas on stage where the music and sound are much better than other places.  I was starting to explore for those places.  Miles Davis. Autobiography of Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe.

 ...behind a mask that seemed incapable of expressing anything, one sensed sensitivity and strength as well as a deeper level of expressivity.  Small gestures, no matter how studied, expressed their awareness of their bodies and drew attention to their provocative sexuality, together conveying a new form of American naturalism.

         These gestures, the relaxed posture, the studied inarticulateness, a calculated detachment, a certain angle of descent, merge with elements of the cool, a powerful metaphor for twentieth-century life. John Szwed, So What: The Life of Miles Davis

Miles Davis has been hailed as a fashion icon for decades. The creator of Birth of the Cool has been placed on innumerable Fashion Hall of Fame lists.  His style has ranged from Brooks Brothers prep to African-inspired dress.  Pity there isn't a photo of him from the 1961 Randall Island festival. In April 1961 GQ chose Davis as “Fashion Personality of the Month; Esquire named Davis one the best dressed men in America in 1960. No one played the trumpet like him, no one embodied cool with such throwaway ease.  Listen to some of his classic pieces.