The collagelike cacophony of Louise Nevelson’s day-to-day wear mirrored the sculptures she created. Odd juxtapositions of dissimilar clothing pieces coalesced in a uniquely compelling way when the artist put them together. Similarly, the flotsam and jetsam of life that she assembled in her sculptures evoke intense feelings but resonate harmoniously. Born in Kiev in 1899, she is best known for Sky Cathedral, created in 1958 out of boxed wooden fragments and debris she found in the street and painted matte black. Nevelson’s connections and contrasts worked. When couturier Arnold Scaasi first met the sculptor, she was wearing a “man’s denim work shirt and a pair of khaki pants. . . . On her head was a pointed wizard’s hat made of some kind of terrible reddish-brown fake fur and a sable coat completed her outfit!” He said she looked like “a cross between an eccentric dyke and an aging, elegant hippie,” and was “mesmerized.” Scaasi went on to design for Nevelson, but the process was almost always collaborative, and she would call him up to suggest ideas. Velour ponchos in green and plum or Persian-wool, chinchilla-lined jackets to wear in her enormous chilly studio on Spring Street, in New York’s Soho, were not unusual commissions. Longtime Vogue editor Diana Vreeland contacted Scaasi in 1977 to request one of Nevelson’s outfits for an exhibition she was curating at the Metropolitan Museum. She thought the artist’s style was “fascinating.”
Getty Images: Nancy R. Schiff/Getty Images
Louise Nevelson, June 1980.
Being “well dressed” is not a question of having expensive clothes or the “right” clothes. I don’t care if you’re wearing rags but they must suit you. If you think you’re not put together well you can’t confront the world.
—Louise Nevelson, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, c. 1965
On the opening night of Nevelson’s 1967 retrospective at the Whitney Museum, she wore a white embroidered peasant blouse, a long Mexican skirt, and on her head a cerulean damask napkin, draping from her shoulders two purple Japanese tapestries—all accessorized with a boar’s teeth necklace and a brooch she crafted from wood and gold. “I look for something that suits me,” Nevelson declared in an interview appearing in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, going on to recount that even as a girl, she felt that fashion was too “temporary.” She looked for things to wear that didn’t change with the seasons and were more “permanent” than the cyclic designer offerings of Paris. In her mid-sixties, Nevelson shopped for vintage lace frocks and Japanese gowns, and she she was almost seventy when she began wearing her trademark false eyelashes. She thought that two or three pairs at a time looked best, although she was known to wear up to five sets—sometimes ones made from mink—on special occasions. The New York Times wrote in 2007 that “Nevelson made old age the stage for a fashion revolution.”
When Nevelson was nine years old, she saw a statue of Joan of Arc at the Rockland (New York) Public Library and decided to become a sculptor.
In 1933, Nevelson worked as Diego Rivera’s assistant when he was making his series of murals, Portrait of America, for the New York Workers School and had an affair with him, much to the annoyance of Frida Kahlo.
Although she knew as a child that she wanted to be an artist, she only began studying art full time when she was twenty-nine. In her book Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life, Laurie Lisle describes how the artist personalized her style as teenager: “When she was about fourteen, she bought a piece of linen and a brimmed hat frame at Woolworth’s and attached the linen in pleats to the frame. She then stenciled and painted butterflies, sewed them onto the hat, and wore her handmade creation to school until she tired of it.” Hats and headscarves were to become a Nevelson specialty. Plush jockey caps, ten-gallon Stetsons, silk bandanas, and furry babushkas were frequent accessories. One of her favorite milliners was Mr. John, whose dramatic creations were worn by the highest society ladies and film stars alike, including Marilyn Monroe. It’s said that Nevelson paid for his luxury pieces with art, as they were so costly. Hats were a must-have by any means necessary. In her biography, Light and Shade, Laurie Wilson revealed that during the 1930s and 1940s Nevelson “became known as ‘The Hat’ because she wore gorgeous chapeaux—sometimes stolen and sometimes purchased by lovers for her favors.”
Every time I put on clothes, I’m creating a picture.
—Louise Nevelson, from Dawns and Dusks, 1976
Nevelson’s radical chic was a style that she grew into over time. It was ignited only when she was in her early thirties, after she left her conservative husband, who had expected her to be his stay-at-home wife. After leaving him, she lived the life of a starving artist but managed to dress with a tidy sense of chic that was light years away from the wild, out-of-time styling of her later years. When Nevelson had her first solo exhibition in 1941 at the Nierendorf Gallery in Berlin and started selling her work in the early 1950s, she also began to morph into the Nevelson of her sartorial legacy; she decided that if people were going to pay attention to her art, they needed to pay attention to her. Her wardrobe did the job.
Getty Images: Oscar White/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images
Louise Nevelson, c. 1970.