Georgia O’Keeffe’s work pares down any excess: it is bold, direct, and graphic in its message and aesthetic. She painted the same subjects over and over again. Her wardrobe was famously similar: she wore the same selection of clothes on rotation, and when she found something she was keen on, she used it again and again. She was born in Wisconsin in 1887; more than a century later, in 2015, American Vogue described the artist’s elegant and minimalist style as “monastic simplicity by way of the southwest.” In 2017, the Brooklyn Museum presented an exhibition around her outfits that was subtitled Living Modern, and curator Wanda Korn told AnOther that O’Keeffe’s “mode was to look around closely at what women were wearing at the time because she never wanted to be contrary to fashion, she just wanted . . . a severe version of anything that was fashionable at the time.”
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Georgia O’Keeffe, 1930.
O’Keeffe can kill a rattlesnake, even in her eightieth year. . . . She rides from the new house in Abiquiu to her first Western home, the Ghost Ranch, in an air-conditioned automobile like any other sensible Westerner. She rises early, eats lightly, has a figure any woman more than half her age would envy, dresses classically, simply. . . . Not provincial in any sense, but thoroughly sophisticated, she has always been more modern than her contemporaries.
— E. C. Goossen, “O’Keeffe,” American Vogue, March 1967
Her favorite designer in the 1950s was Claire McCardell, the fashion pioneer who helped build the American clothing industry in rebellion to the ornate, overfeminized Parisian tradition and the emerging New Look. McCardell made womenswear that was simple yet elegant, easy to wear, and unfussy. Her style fit with O’Keeffe’s sensibilities, especially McCardell’s classic “popover” dresses, first designed in 1942, which inspired the artist’s favored dress around the ranch in New Mexico. She wore this silhouette constantly, cinched at the waist with a Hector Aguilar silver belt made in Taxco. Often the dresses were surprising shades of yellow and pink—O’Keeffe’s wardrobe was not limited to the black and white she preferred for her austere “public” portraits. Quite often she found a dress she liked and either had it copied or sewed a version of it herself. Painting and riding, she wore comfortable, practical workwear—double denim (top and pants) with Navajo design accents, or a traditionally printed blouse paired with a geometrically patterned fabric belt. In one of the most famous images of O’Keeffe, shown with the cowboy Orville Cox, Ansel Adams shot her wearing a wide-brimmed black gaucho hat. On the pages of a fashion magazine the hat was a striking statement piece, but it was a useful everyday accessory for protection from the beating New Mexico sun.
In 1929, O’Keeffe learned to drive and bought a Model A Ford. She named it Hello.
O’Keeffe owned a first edition copy of James Joyce’s classic modernist novel Ulysses.
O’Keeffe’s style legacy is distinct and clear-cut—she loved an unfaltering, strongly monochrome wardrobe and a silhouette cut away from the body, preferably with pockets and accessorized with a silver brooch or clasp. She could also make innovative and edgy choices. After the death in 1946 of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keeffe traveled the world, and when she returned from Spain in the 1950s, she brought back an Eisa suit. Eisa was Cristobál Balenciaga’s first fashion house, launched before the Spanish Civil War. The suit is simple and plain but cut with the masterful precision for which Balenciaga was so admired. It was a radical, chic choice, showing how in tune O’Keeffe was with the direction of fashion.
O’Keeffe’s dress sense stemmed from the confidence of knowing what she liked and going with it. Along with a few other forward-thinking style connoisseurs, O’Keeffe started collecting and wearing Japanese kimonos in the early 1900s, prefiguring the wrap dresses she would later adopt. Paul Poiret had begun making kimonos in Paris around the same time; the man who freed women from the corset has been lauded for leading the way Chanel would follow later in freeing women’s fashion from its nineteenth-century restrictions. O’Keeffe herself threw out the corsets early in her life: they didn’t work with the useful, easy shapes she preferred, even as a girl growing up in Wisconsin. Later in life she turned to the Viennese tailor Knize, who dressed Hapsburg archdukes, sewing each of their suits with seven thousand hand-done stiches. Always a menswear tailor, Knize didn’t begin catering to women directly until the 1990s, although some, including Marlene Dietrich and O’Keeffe, had earlier commissioned them to create jackets, trousers, and skirts. In these garments, exquisitely made from beautiful plain wool fabrics, O’Keeffe found a style that harmonized with her own high standards. That it was menswear made no difference: it was the look she wanted.
The world of fashion and style became interested in O’Keeffe early in her career. Vogue featured her in 1924 with a photograph by Stieglitz. His famous images of O’Keeffe show a yin to her later yang: in these portraits she wears her hair untied, her body is voluptuously on show, and she looks as loose and free as she later appears austere and purposeful. Throughout her life, noted photographers—including Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, and Annie Leibovitz—continued to ask her to sit for them. After Stieglitz, however, O’Keeffe art-directed her own pose for the camera. She engineered a publicly spare and reserved image until she died in 1986 at age ninety-eight. In 1983, in a late interview with Andy Warhol, she admitted going to visit Elizabeth Arden, who put makeup on her, and confessed that afterward she “went home and saw myself and was so embarrassed. I couldn’t wash my face fast enough.”
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Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico, April 1960.