Frida Kahlo with Flowers Portrait T-Shirt

Kahlo painted herself fifty-five times, and she is the reason anybody knows what she looked like — braided crown, flowers set into the hair, the eyebrows entirely unnegotiated.

The flowers were never decoration. She dressed deliberately, in Tehuana clothing and arranged hair, and built an image so specific that it now functions as a logo, which is a strange fate for work that was mostly about pain and a body that had been broken in a bus accident at eighteen. The portrait tradition she was working in wanted women pleasant. She declined.

Daddy wears this one and expects to be asked about it, which is the point of owning a portrait of somebody who understood self-presentation better than anyone in the twentieth century.

The shirt itself is the good kind of basic: combed ring-spun cotton, preshrunk, side-seamed so it hangs straight, taped shoulders so the collar doesn’t twist after the fortieth wash. It fits like the tee you’ve had for ten years, on day one.

How to wear it

Under an open chambray or denim shirt, with dark jeans. Nothing else printed anywhere on you.