Diane Keaton’s clothes were cinema. That much is certainly true when she emerges in “Annie Hall” after a tennis match in a wide-brimmed hat, khaki pants and an oversize vest with a tie poking out of it — perhaps the most memorable outfit in the history of movies.
That’s the moment when Keaton’s Annie first connects with Alvy Singer, played by the film’s director, Woody Allen, and her styling is so immediately idiosyncratic that it tells you everything you need to know about her character: She’s unique and a little bit askew in her supreme preppiness. She looks like no one you’ve ever seen, a revelation in the tie her “grammy” gave her.
Her dialogue seems to match the quirkiness of her clothing as she awkwardly makes small talk with Alvy, chiding herself for saying something “dumb” when he compliments her tennis playing. “La-di-da, la-di-da, la-la,” she says, her hand on her hip. You get the sense that Annie threw on her clothes the same way she utters “La-di-da”: with little thought but complete earnestness, almost magically intriguing.
Keaton, whose death at 79 was confirmed on Saturday, was already known for “The Godfather” films by the time she appeared in “Annie Hall” in 1977, but it was the Allen comedy that would define not just her career but also her unmistakable aesthetic. The Diane Keaton look consisted of high necklines and oddball takes on traditionally male looks — hats and blazers; turtlenecks and button-downs; scarves and ties: menswear reimagined for herself. Other women would try to emulate her on red carpets or even in movies, like Meg Ryan in “When Harry Met Sally” (1989), for example. And yet, for the imitators, these ensembles looked like costumes. For Keaton, they were an ethos.
As an actress, Keaton could, when she wanted to, disappear into roles, like the unsuspecting mob wife Kay Corleone in “The Godfather” saga or the early 20th-century journalist Louise Bryant in Warren Beatty’s drama “Reds” (1981). But Keaton’s, well, Keaton-ness was also one of her great skills.
In her 2011 memoir “Then Again,” she wrote that when making “Annie Hall,” Allen told her to “wear what you want to wear.” She explained, “So I did what Woody said: I wore what I wanted to wear, or, rather, I stole what I wanted to wear from the cool-looking women on the streets of New York.” She borrowed the bolero hat from the French actress Aurore Clément when she showed up on the set of “The Godfather Part II.”
Keaton downplayed her role in the creation of Annie’s signature look. In her telling, the “street chic” women of SoHo should have been credited as the real costume designers, before saying that wasn’t “entirely true” because Allen was the auteur behind every creative decision in the movie.
But that take denies her the authorship of the career-defining character that she so clearly deserves. She makes Annie’s style part of her performance. It’s there in the way her hat increases her bashfulness, in the sequence where Alvy tells her he loves her and in how she disappears into her jacket to evoke an ethereal crooner when she sings “Seems Like Old Times.” She turns the pockets of her pants into props, putting an errant hand in when she’s trying to appear nonchalant.
Annie is a woman of contradictions. She is both Alvy’s perfect woman and a mess of insecurities. She is flighty and self-possessed. Everything on her body reflects the character’s paradoxes. She defied the conventions of what women were supposed to wear, cloaking herself in baggy pieces designed for the male body, and yet she was consummately sexy.
The clothes might have overtaken a lesser performer, but with Keaton it all went hand in hand, and savvy filmmakers knew how to use her fashion proclivities to their advantage. More than two decades later, Nancy Meyers’s “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003) ushered in a new phase of Keaton’s career, casting her as a playwright who ends up falling for her daughter’s much older boyfriend, played by Jack Nicholson. It’s summer, but Keaton wears turtlenecks under sweaters and button-downs.
When Nicholson’s character is laid up after a heart attack in her Hamptons home, he asks her, “What’s with the turtlenecks?” She replies: “I like them. I’ve always liked them, and I’m just a turtleneck kind of gal.” He goads her by asking if she ever gets hot, and the double entendre is deliberate. She snaps, “No,” before adding, “Not lately.” She is utterly confident in her choices, both in tops and in life.
Yes, part of the pleasure of that rom-com is seeing how these two people fall for each other, but the film is less about him getting her to take off her turtleneck than it is about him embracing that a turtleneck kind of gal is the one he wants. Because it’s Diane Keaton, after all. Her sartorial persuasions were part of her eternal charm.