Diane Keaton’s style was wildly eccentric — and the most authentic thing in Hollywood
The most famous line in “Something’s Gotta Give,” Nancy Meyers’ 2003 romantic comedy starring Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, looks like nothing on the page, but Keaton made it sound like everything.
“I’m just a turtleneck kind of gal,” Keaton, as playwright Erica Barry, bristled at Nicholson’s Harry Sanborn, defending her fondness for covering up even in the summer heat.
Keaton, who died Saturday at the age of 79, was the queen of the throwaway line, but here with air-quote gestures and an angry heel turn, it was a self-aware mantra. Her charming realism, with a touch of ditz or frenzied confidence, gave it urgency: a voice for women near 60 who had a career and a family but also deserved love.
When Harry finally succeeded in seducing Erica and he scoffed again at the turtleneck, she panted at him to grab the scissors: “CUT IT OFF!”
Keaton had a magical way of entwining fashion and performance, making us feel we knew her through her totally original way of dressing herself, on-screen and off. It’s funny: She looked nutty, at times bizarre, but that made her relatable, human, especially in the highly manufactured world of Hollywood. She wrote the story of personal style in the film industry, beginning with her menswear-inspired wardrobe in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” then onto her polished yuppie professionalism in “Baby Boom” and her adoption of creamy suits — all the way through the coastal grandmother mania she started with “Something’s Gotta Give.”
Style, in Hollywood, is a bit like knowing how to sing. No actor needs it to survive, but if you can belt out a tune or create a look so original that women spend decades copying it, suddenly it becomes inseparable from your acting chops. Keaton embodied personal style: a desire, even a need, to look distinct in an industry that is much more eager to celebrate sameness. That, as much as her Academy Award win and nominations and her acting skills — a total naturalist who went toe-to-toe with Al Pacino, Warren Beatty and Nicholson and seized the screen even in the role of mouseburger — is her legacy. She refused, as a celebrity — that most cookie-cutter, people pleaser American role — to be anyone but herself.
It was simple and it wasn’t: Keaton knew what she wanted to wear, and she didn’t want to look like the vamp or the celluloid siren or the glamour queen. Costume designer Ruth Morley, who helped create the look of “Annie Hall,” integrated Keaton’s own pieces into the character’s style, setting a template for decades of performances. Her preppy tomboy style became a phenomenon, helping to put Ralph Lauren on the map and showing millions of second-wave feminists a way of looking cool rather than merely appealing. She took home her Academy Award in 1978 wearing a plaid blazer and long skirt, her hair piled on her head in Edwardian splendor, cementing the look as a phenomenon.
That style became a part of nearly every character she played. Rather than coming off as Keaton burrowing into a typecast rut, she instead used clothing and charisma to bring to life feelings and experiences that seemed too real, too female for the big screen: the original manic pixie dream girl heartbreaker of “Annie Hall,” the kinky good girl in “Looking For Mr. Goodbar,” the woman torn between tapping at the glass ceiling and motherhood in “Baby Boom.” In the 1990s, as she entered her 50s, she spoke of her distaste for plastic surgery, making her lined face and funky tailoring (decidedly not the matronly looks Hollywood likes to force women into) a raison d’être. When Keaton appeared on the 2016 cover of Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood issue, she shrugged at the racks of designer clothes on set and instead wore her own black tailored ensemble amid a sea of plunging necklines and bare shoulders.
Keaton’s look was totally original, and yet you could put your finger on a Keatonian style: the wide-brimmed hats, the menswear-inspired trousers, the vests, some kooky detail like tinted glasses or a flower brooch. As the years went by and Hollywood fashion became a space for deal making rather than an actor’s personal expression through clothes, Keaton’s sartorial stubbornness seemed like even more of a statement.
Keaton was inspired equally by her mother’s zest for secondhand shopping and her own idolization of Katharine Hepburn. But Keaton had little of Hepburn’s sting or defensiveness about her look. When Barbara Walters once asked Hepburn if she owned a skirt, the actress snapped, “I’ll wear it to your funeral.” Instead, Keaton had a warmth and a vulnerability that made her outrageous choices accessible. In a collection of her fashion remembrances and favorite looks released last year, she included a chapter on her less-successful styles, titled “WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.” Ha!
She wore her eccentricity proudly. For years she had a public Pinterest page, documenting the inspirations behind her numerous home renovations, including a large collection of clown portraits. (When it suddenly disappeared, she had a mini-meltdown on Twitter; who can’t relate to technology’s failures robbing us of our small, strange passions?) She wrote several books (including an anthology of clown portraits), documenting in one her love of walking around Santa Monica, a thermos of red wine in her hands.
Keaton never married; she adopted two children when she was in her 50s. She never once did a magazine cover that betrayed her sensibility, never did a makeover, never compromised her beliefs or taste to win our approval. She drew flack for standing by Woody Allen when Hollywood largely deserted him following accusations (which he denied) that he had sexually abused his adopted daughter.
She made up her own rules, and wore them for us to see. And she had a great time following them.