Is there anything that hasn’t featured Frida Kahlo’s face?

This year marks the 70th anniversary of Frida Kahlo’s death. This rebellious, boundary-breaking artist inspired generations of artists and brought Mexican art to the forefront.

But sometimes it seems like her greatest legacy is the marketability of her face — and those eyebrows.

Kahlo’s stylized and simplified image can now be found on T-shirts, canvas bags, eye masks, phone cases, oven mitts and flower pots.

So what made its appearance so marketable?

What is fridamania?

It’s not uncommon to find an artist’s self-portrait printed on a piece of clothing, a bag, or an accessory. But in Kahlo’s case, it’s not just her psychologically profound autobiographical representations that adorn gifts and gadgets.

Red lips, black eyes, a monobrow and dark hair decorated with flowers and you know it’s Kahlo – even in a minimalist style. Her image appeared on billboards and was assimilated into fashion design as early as the 1970s.

Now, in addition to Etsy artisans, corporations like Forever 21, Mattel, the maker of the Barbie doll, and Vans have products bearing her image.

This combination of her art and her real-life appearance has transformed her into a painting with cult status. Certainly, her bold, bohemian look with its striking colors and floral arrangements lends itself to becoming an eye-catching and repeatable motif.

Her bushy eyebrows and stark, unapologetic self-image also resonate with the current rejection of artificial and conformist standards of beauty. Having Kahlo’s face on your bag means you support unshaven, all-natural beauty values.

Or perhaps you see it as a symbolic representation of outsiders.

“I used to think I was the weirdest person in the world,” she reportedly said. “Read this and know that yes, it’s true, I’m here and I’m just as weird as you are.”

Frida Kahlo as a cult figure

For those familiar with her life, the decision to wear the artist’s image also suggests support for a figure who is an icon of women’s courage and fortitude in the face of adversity.

At 18, Kahlo had an accident that changed her life. “She was riding a bus in Mexico City when a streetcar hit it. The metal railing pierced her abdomen; her spine was broken in three places. No one thought she would survive, or that she would walk again,” describes biographer Stephanie Mencimer.

However, Kahlo did not let this stop her from painting, even while immobilized in a cast.

The rest of her life was a series of tragic and traumatic experiences, including affairs, divorces, and devastating health problems.

It presented Kahlo as an archetypal, troubled and suffering artist, and her figure became a mythological cult heroine.

Some scholars, such as Margaret A. Lindauer, argue that this distorts the assessment of her art, in which “there is a direct connection between the events of her life and the meaning of the painting.”

However, her image has become even more iconic and mass-accessible, gaining all sorts of symbolic meaning: from the emancipation of gender roles to being an ambassador for facial hair.

Yet the commercialization of her image, which now appears on almost every mass-produced product, has divorced it from its deeper meaning and it is now merely a stylish and stylized symbol of cool.

As the Messy Nessy website puts it, she has become “her own cookie cutter self, all the while cashing in on capitalist corporations in ways the artist herself would not have wanted.”