Frida Kahlo was a famous Mexican artist and fashion icon who was known for painting self-portraits and wearing traditional dresses. Something that surprises many people is she spent much of her life wearing plaster corsets.
When Frida was 18, on September 17, 1925, she was in a tragic accident. The bus she was riding was hit by a tram. Badly injured and immobile for the first few months of her recovery, Frida took up painting. Frida wore plaster corsets for most of her life because her spine was too weak to support itself. She painted them, naturally, covering them with pasted scraps of fabric and drawings of tigers, monkeys, plumed birds, a blood-red hammer and sickle, and streetcars like the one whose handrail rammed through her body.
After 1944, Frida’s doctors prescribed months of bed rest, encasing her tortured body in a succession of plaster or steel corsets that helped her to sit or stand. Frida described these corsets and the treatments that accompanied them as “punishment.”
There were twenty-eight corsets in all–one made of steel, three of leather, and the rest of plaster. One allowed her neither to sit nor to recline. It made her so angry that she took it off, and used a sash to tie her torso to the back of a chair in order to support her spine.
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