Frida Kahlo Takes the Wheel of a Paris Bus in New AI Ad

Frida Kahlo is driving a bus through Paris, chewing bubblegum, in a new advertisement made with artificial intelligence (AI, software that generates images and video from instructions).

The ad comes from Les Énervés, a fashion brand with roots in Paris and the Indonesian island of Bali. ARTnews reported that the clip first appeared on Instagram in October and began spreading on X, the social media platform, this month.

The story it plays with is a painful one. In 1925, when she was 18, Kahlo was riding a bus that collided with a trolley, a tram-like electric vehicle. The crash severely injured her pelvis, abdomen and uterus. The ad reverses that scene. Kahlo sits at the wheel instead of in a seat.

Her passengers are a famous crowd. The Mona Lisa, the painting hanging in the Louvre museum in Paris, is on board, and so is Vincent van Gogh. In the ad, Van Gogh's severed ear has been replaced with a steel prosthetic. Kahlo introduces herself with the line "It's Frida, bitch," and the soundtrack then switches from an Édith Piaf song to Britney Spears's "Gimme More."

The brand says the bus was recreated as a Renault TN, a model that might have been seen in Paris when Kahlo held an exhibition there in 1939. Les Énervés also framed the ad with two lines: "A hundred years later, she is the one driving," and "Vincent and Mona Lisa are in the back. Nothing is going to hit her this time."

The ad was directed by the brand's founder, Wakim Krari, who described its production as "AI, and a lot of patience."

For viewers, the piece turns a moment of injury into a joke about control. For the brand, it is a fashion company's advertisement built around a real painter's name and face. Kahlo's image is the centre of the campaign, and the ad leaves its meaning to the people who watch it.