Aliya Hollub

Obsessions

Art
Women on Themselves
A painting of a woman clipping her toenails on a picnic blanket as a red explosion rises behind the treeline
Sasha Gordon, It Was Still Far Away, 2024
THE TOENAILS!!
A close detail of the same painting: a sock, a bare foot and clippers held mid-cut on a blue blanket
personal grooming > impending doom
A painting of a red-haired painter in a red studio working on a monumental grisaille of a nude torso
Lisa Yuskavage, Painter Painting, 2024
how does she make pink feel dangerous?
A photograph of a red-haired woman in a beige bomber jacket and pale latex boots seated on green fabric before a dark green curtain
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #690, 2025
my original art crush.
This fall, Sherman debuts her new Fabric Matrons series at Hauser & Wirth London, with works incorporating fabrics and elements from Chanel’s archives. October 13 through December 23, 2026.
Frida Kahlo’s painting of herself before a cracked green landscape, her torso held in a white orthopedic corset with a fractured column in place of her spine
Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944
Kahlo depicts her body split open, her injured spine replaced by a fractured column and her torso held together by an orthopedic corset.
she made the brace part of the image.
A photograph of a hot pink book page carrying two quotations in white and black serif type
“Frida is the only painter who gave birth to herself.” Lola Álvarez Bravo. From Frida Kahlo: Fashion as the Art of Being by Susana Martínez Vidal. Photographed from my copy.
gave birth to herself!!!
and then fashion kept coming back to it.
An open book spread: a black buckled corset look with a thorn headpiece on the left, The Broken Column reproduced on the right
The body becomes the reference
The Broken Column beside a corset from the Jean Paul Gaultier Spring 1989 ready-to-wear collection, titled “Homage to Frida Kahlo.”
Kahlo’s orthopedic corsets were medical necessities, but she also painted, decorated and incorporated them into her own image. Fashion designers have repeatedly returned to that visual vocabulary: constraint, structure, ornament and the body underneath.
Frida → fashion
“Carrying on my life enclosed in steel.”
Frida Kahlo
An open book spread: a checkerboard beaded harness dress photographed from behind on the left, a hot pink page carrying a Frida Kahlo quotation on the right
A look from the Alexander McQueen Spring 2014 ready-to-wear collection, which the book connects to one of Kahlo’s plaster corsets.
A medical object becomes a self-portrait. A self-portrait becomes a fashion reference.
Music
under the covers, on repeat
Camera Roll
A picnic blanket in a park with a book, a green juice, a tote bag and blue sneakers
A child’s drawing of a rainbow peace sign above the handwritten words I have a dream to stop littering and clean the earth
Inside a bag: Chanel slingback shoes resting on a plastic container of pinwheel sandwiches
Six ripe mangoes laid out on grass
A scrapbook page with a black and white portrait of a woman in glasses beside older family photographs
Vanity Fair, Interview and W magazines fanned on a wooden table beside a spider plant