The Style of Georgia O'Keeffe
Rainy Saturdays are an excellent time to enjoy an art museum. With relatives in town for the day and downpour conditions, we went to the Brooklyn Museum and viewed Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern. The retrospective included fundamental paintings, intimate photographs and choice garments, which stole the show
As a young New Yorker, O’Keeffe, a Wisconsin transplant, wasn’t wealthy and sewed her own clothes to achieve the look she desired. Her designs were refined, simple black and white affairs that featured feminine flourishes like discreet pleating and delicate fabrics, but were gender-neutral in appearance. 100 years ago, O’Keeffe adopted an androgynous mode of dressing that gained traction 30 years after her death. She is the direct link between the simplicity of Beau Brummell and the monochrome austerity of Rick Owens. Her silhouettes fell between the two, true to form yet not revealing, lending masculine cuts to feminine pieces.
Georgia O'Keeffe's Marimekko dresses.
When O’Keeffe began to spend more time in — and eventually moved to — New Mexico, she adopted elements of the cowboy look. O’Keeffe’s Southwestern style predated and set the path for Patti Smith and Fran Lebowitz. Her influence is apparent on both, from Smith’s tailored black-and-white ensembles to Lebowitz’s cowboy-dandy blazer and denim look. One trio of O'Keeffe's shirts (two denim, one large-gingham) looked like they came straight from my closet. As O’Keeffe wrote to Murdock Pemberton, the New Yorker art critic who gifted her the gingham shirt, “...you can always send me your shirts if you don’t give them to anyone else if they are anything like this one—it is fine with blue jeans—the costume of this country—I rather think they are our only national costumes.”
O’Keeffe’s personal style mixed men’s, handcrafted and found garments from travels (like kimonos) with designer pieces. Who beside O’Keeffe would think of pairing an Emilio Pucci dress with a Native American belt? And how many people would wear an English bespoke suit or a Marimekko dress in the middle of the desert? O’Keeffe’s extensive collection of ballet slippers made me want to go and get a pair of my own — à la Serge Gainsbourg — because they would look so comfortable and nonchalant with a denim shirt, as I imagine O'Keeffe paired them with. And when O’Keeffe needed a dash of color, she would wear a red madras dress appropriate for the dry desert heat. All of these garments would look good today, either in the city or on the range. That’s the beauty of timeless garments with classic silhouettes; they never go out of style and can be subverted any which way to make them our own. No one did it better than O’Keeffe.
Don’t ignore O’Keeffe’s art, but Living Modern is worth a visit for her clothes alone. As far as her painting is concerned, I like her late work better than her early paintings — which were austere before she became inspired by the Southwest’s scenery. These beginning works have merit, though, especially her enlarged drawings of flowers and other flora, which are early assertions of feminine power, particularly against the male art critics who erroneously sexualized them. Conversely, O’Keeffe’s masculine style is a direct predecessor to the workwear movement and gender-fluid dressing. Is she the only reason we’ve reached this point? No, but a look at her wardrobe is a history lesson into how American culture approaches fashion and cements her place in the pantheon of style icons.