I didn’t even know they had a name for it, but Fridamania seems about right. Have you heard of it? The Tate, as part of their show, Frida: The Making of an Icon, have introduced Fridamania, “Kahlo’s transformation into a global brand (that) will feature more than 200 commercial objects that encompass her art, image, style and persona.” For some reason, and I’m not the best marketing mind in the world, I really like this. I think to understand Frida in 2026 is to understand brands, to understand repetition, to understand how you can see a face/logo and understand what it means without ever having seen the product in person in the first place. Frida’s unibrow, her face, is the face of art, of an artist, of a woman who changed the course of history before she realized she was. She’s Mexico’s icon, but also the art world’s icon. I’m all in.

We named The Unibrow after Frida, or should I say, the concept was born from seeing her as a deity while walking through a market in Jalisco a few years ago, when I was still at Juxtapoz. She was everywhere: on ornaments, key chains, totes, mugs, shirts, posters, prints, magnets… like on everything. All bootlegged, DIY merch. And it wasn’t her paintings; it was her face, her self, and not the self-portraits, but photos of her. She was this transcendent figure that stood for art even if you didn’t see the art in front of you or understood where to even find an original work. She was in the highest of brows in the art world lexicon, the lowest of brows in the unsanctioned goods around me, and yet, she was synonymous with art. Her unibrow was the unibrow. So the name stuck and here we are. The Unibrow, the brow that connects all brows.

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Frida: The Making of Icon, is on view at Tate Modern, London, through 3 January 2027

Top image: Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907–1954), Untitled [Self-portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird], 1940. Oil on canvas mounted to board. Nickolas Muray Collection of Mexican Art, 66.6. Harry Ransom Center.

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