Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887 to 1986) was an American modernist painter, best known for her flowers, her New York skyscrapers and her paintings of the American Southwest. Her first museum exhibition was held at the Brooklyn Museum in 1927. Ninety years later, the same museum showed her wardrobe for the first time, beside her paintings and photographs, in Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, an exhibition organized by the art historian Wanda M. Corn.

This study asks what her clothes teach about dressing in repeats, buying less and stopping the chain that one new thing can start. It draws only on the public record: the exhibition, Corn’s book, published reviews, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s records and O’Keeffe’s own published words.

Black, white and no ornament

Corn studied six decades of O’Keeffe’s garments and accessories. “She never dramatically changed her style from X to Y, she was very consistent,” she told AnOther in 2017. Early on, O’Keeffe settled on clothes without ornament: black and white, loose shapes with soft lines, one color per outfit and natural materials such as wool, cotton and silk. She wanted to be, in Corn’s words, “practical and comfortable but still have a beautiful shape.”

In New York in the 1920s and 1930s, her summer outfit was a black skirt and a white blouse, and black took over in winter. A monochrome wardrobe, she felt then, left color for her paintings. In New Mexico, where she had spent most summers since 1929 and made her permanent home in 1949, she added jeans and denim shirts and, after the Second World War, the yellows, blues and pinks of the landscape. From the 1960s through the 1980s her two signature outfits were a wrap dress and a black suit.

None of this was a protest against fashion. Corn says O’Keeffe watched what was in style and made a sparer, more severe version of it, dressing “at the edge of fashion, not in the middle of it.”

In 1922 she told the New York Sun, “It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.” She was talking about painting, not clothes. Corn’s book argues that she carried the style of her art into her dress and her homes, so the remark is a fair guide to her closet too.

Thirteen wrap dresses and a teal zipper

Her habits were just as steady.

Sewing her own. In her early years she made most of her clothes. Corn and her colleagues attributed some unlabeled garments to her own sewing, though a sewing expert writing in Threads found a few of those attributions optimistic.

One smock, copied. Her first wrap dress was an artist’s smock bought from Neiman Marcus in the late 1950s, which her seamstress copied in many colors. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s record of a pink cotton one notes that she owned 13 dresses in this style, 12 of them from this pattern, with the sleeves lengthened from three-quarter to full. It calls the dress “well worn.”

A designer, copied. She called the designer Claire McCardell “the best woman designer we’ve ever had,” and had a local seamstress copy one of McCardell’s dresses in other fabrics and colors.

The same shoe, again. She preferred flats and often bought one shoe in several colors and materials. As Ellen Roberts of the Norton Museum of Art said: “They worked for her, it was easy, and that way it was almost like a uniform.”

Mended, not replaced. A mid-1930s linen blouse attributed to her was mended twice at the neck. When a suit skirt’s zipper broke, she put in a teal one because it would not show. The art critic Murdock Pemberton sent her his old button-down shirt; she wrote that she “wore it with great pleasure” and eventually turned its worn collar into a stand-up one.

Kept for decades. Silk tunics moved with her between homes for more than 50 years, and she still had clothes from the 1920s in the 1980s. A black suit from a Spanish couture house, probably bought in 1953 or 1954, closely repeats a pleated black wool dress she had made mostly herself. Not everything was minimal (later she owned 20 or so kimonos), but the core barely moved.

Habits from O’Keeffe that cost nothing

Settle the rules once. Pick a palette, two or three fabrics and a comfort test, and hold every possible purchase against them. Most will fail, which is the point. As Roberts said of O’Keeffe, “She could put it on every morning, she didn’t have to think about it, and that way she had more time to paint.”

Repeat what works. When a piece earns its place, buy the same again or ask a tailor to copy it, rather than hunting for a new look. Our guide to uniform dressing shows how to build a small set of repeats. This is also how a settled look stops the Diderot effect: a copy of a dress you already own cannot make the rest of your closet look wrong, so each new purchase becomes a replacement, not the first link of a chain.

Mend before you replace. A new zipper in whatever color you have, a few stitches at a worn neckline, a frayed collar turned in. Our buy it for life playbook has more on keeping what you own in use for years.

Wear it out, and count. A dress worn for years gets cheaper every time you put it on. The Cost per Wear Calculator shows the math: a $100 dress worn 100 times costs $1 a wear.

Say yes to hand-me-downs. O’Keeffe was glad to wear a critic’s old shirt. A secondhand piece that fits your rules arrives without the shine of something new, so it rarely makes the rest of your closet look tired.

A black wrap dress will not make a painter

Buying her clothes would not buy her eye. Reaching for the symbols of an identity in place of the work behind it is symbolic self-completion, and it tends to start a chain of purchases rather than end one.

What made O’Keeffe’s wardrobe hers was a set of decisions made early and habits kept for six decades: repeat what works, mend it, keep it. Those are free. Copy the habits and leave the dresses in the museum.