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For many of her fans, she was like a rare bird soaring from bygone days when progress and growing freedoms for women seemed inevitable.
Rhonda Garelick writes about the intersection of aesthetics and culture for the Style section. She is the founding director of the Institute for Public Humanities and the Arts at Hofstra University, where she is also a professor of literature.
Oct. 13, 2025Updated 6:49 p.m. ET
The sudden loss of a beloved star always causes pain and shock in her public. But for many of us who grew up watching Diane Keaton, this feels different, as if we have lost a kind of ageless sprite we expected to have floating alongside us forever.
This has a lot to do with Ms. Keaton’s famous style, which was more than just a series of charmingly quirky outfits. Although she was 79, Diane Keaton seemed, not young, but also not old. Not really anything connected to time or its calibration. Instead, she seemed to exist on a plane entirely separate from such mundane matters. In part, this is because she hewed to one recognizable look that remained constant for over 50 years. We know the Annie-Hall-ish basics by heart: the brimmed hats, wide belts, slouchy vests, baggy trousers or big skirts, big scarves, spectacles (often tinted) and unfussy hair and makeup.
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Even at super-glam events like the Academy Awards, where actresses typically display acres of bare flesh and elaborately made-up (often surgically modified) faces, Ms. Keaton looked eternally herself — comfortably elegant in glasses, pants, hat and maybe a necktie. Not only did she resist Hollywood’s objectifying and ageist beauty standards, her boho, free and slightly androgynous style felt very 1970s. It invoked, that is, that era of feminist promises.
In seeming so authentic and unfettered — both physically and personally — Ms. Keaton felt like a reminder of those promises, like a rare bird soaring in from bygone days when progress and growing freedoms for women seemed inevitable.
She never amazed us with how oddly young (or old) she looked. Nor did she ever seem to adapt or modify her look as she aged, because it simply had nothing to do with age at all. And so, by never appearing to defy or combat age or time, she managed to sidestep them completely, remaining somehow ethereally “other.”
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The power of Ms. Keaton’s style derived also from its unusual collage-like quality. While her look was organic, it consisted of many discrete parts. To see her was to take in these many components, with all their discernible gaps, connections and openings. We perceived her eyes through her glasses, her face from beneath bangs or the brims of hats. Ms. Keaton wore assemblages more than mere outfits, artful combinations of things whose surfaces opened up inviting spaces — like little welcoming rooms to traverse with our eyes.
Instead of emulating Greek statuary — monuments of poreless perfection, to be admired passively from afar — Ms. Keaton resembled kinetic sculpture, which encouraged interaction. In time, the natural lines and dynamic creases of her face became just more components of this kinetic system.
This mobile, collage quality was not only sartorial, but also literary and artistic. Ms. Keaton was an accomplished writer. Two of her books, “Then, Again” (about her mother and their relationship) and “Brother and Sister” are family memoirs, and intersperse her own prose with excerpts from letters and diaries written by her mother and her brother, Randy.
Ms. Keaton welcomed multiple voices into her own, incorporating diverse elements into a harmonious whole — just as she did with her wardrobe. Another book, “The House that Pinterest Built,” combines photography, design advice and personal memories, creating a similar effect. (The approach may have roots in her early childhood. In “Brother and Sister,” Ms. Keaton reveals that “cutting up pictures, collecting them, and making collages became a favorite form of escape and one of our primary means of expression.”)
Even Ms. Keaton’s conversational patterns — both on and offscreen — seemed to favor an “assemblage” or collagist approach. She was exceptionally good at dialogue, a quick volleyer of words. For this reason, Ms. Keaton shined especially on talk shows, where she never spouted rehearsed-sounding anecdotes, but sparred and quipped spontaneously, co-creating — collaging — the conversation. Watch her mastery, for example, with Charlie Rose.
We must count also Ms. Keaton’s famous vulnerability — about matters big and small — as part of her style. She’d readily admit she was insecure and nervous, that she used her bangs to hide her face, was deeply ambivalent about marriage and (incredibly) had never received a proposal. Sharing perceived weakness like this, Ms. Keaton opened (metaphorical) gaps in her persona, revealing herself to her audience. Such candor and unguardedness helped make her an excellent actor as well as an appealing personality.
Times have changed a lot, but Diane Keaton never seemed to. We never imagined a time without her.
Rhonda Garelick writes the Face Forward column for The Times’s Style section. She is the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Public Humanities at Hofstra University, where she is also the John Cranford Adams Distinguished Professor of Literature.
