LONDON.- Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), as an artist and a woman, has a unique international appeal. Her instantly recognizable work draws extensively on her life and her extraordinarily personal reflections upon it.

On Kahlo’s death, her husband, Diego Rivera (1886-1957), ordered that her most private possessions be locked away until 15 years after his death. The bathroom in which her belongings were stored in fact remained unopened until 2004.

Through this incredible archive, Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up gives readers a unique window into Kahlo’s life. It focuses on the personal, combining her prosthetics, jewelry, cosmetics and clothes with self-portraits, diary entries, and letters, to build an intimate portrait of the artist through her possessions, setting the archived materials in the context of her political and social beliefs.

Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up accompanies a major exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum; the first exhibition outside Mexico to display Kahlo’s clothes and intimate possessions, reuniting them with self-portraits and photographs to offer a fresh perspective on her compelling life story.

This stunning volume accompanies an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, running June 16-November 4, 2018.

Claire Wilcox is senior curator in the department of furniture, textiles and fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum and professor in fashion curation at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London.

Circe Henestrosa is an independent curator and Head of the School of Fashion at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore.