Redefining Fashion: The Timeless Style of Joan Mitchell
As Rose implied, Mitchell was not an obviously fashionable person. It seems highly plausible she felt the same way about clothes as she did about her work. “My paintings have nothing to do with what’s in and what’s out,” she told the New York Times in 1991, speaking from Vétheuil, France, where she had lived since 1968.
It’s a sentiment echoed by the gallerist John Cheim, who knew Mitchell in her later years. “Like her paintings, she is anti-style, very much an authentic rebel,” he says. “She wore what she liked—jeans, corduroys, turtlenecks, untucked Oxford shirts, suede athletic shoes, cashmere scarves—and she could wear this anywhere, anytime and look sharp and imposing.”
The first time he clocked her, it was in Manhattan, following a performance of Parade at the Met Opera in 1981. Cheim says Mitchell was wearing “a broad-shouldered, waist-length fur ‘monkey coat’ and slacks, with large, dark glasses. She struck me as a character out of a 1940s Hollywood film—perhaps Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, or Barbara Stanwyck.”
Born in Chicago, Mitchell grew up in a rich family. Her father, James Mitchell, was a physician and president of the American Dermatological Association (he was also an amateur watercolorist), while her mother, Marion Strobel, was a co-editor of Poetry magazine, which published the likes of Ezra Pound. As a girl, Mitchell was a debutante, diver, and champion figure skater who loved dungarees and mannish shirts. She discovered Van Gogh at age six and wrote poems, one of which included the line: “Her eyebrows were plucked and she wore French heels.”
The quirks of Mitchell’s style could be partly explained by the starkly different circles that she moved within. “I think there was a divide that she was trying to navigate for many years between her family, who expected her to be a proper young lady, and her own rebellious streak and inner pull toward the artist community,” says Sarah Roberts, senior director of curatorial affairs at the Foundation. It was not unusual for Mitchell and her sister to change outfits several times a day: In a letter she wrote to her ex-lover Mike Goldberg at 28, when her father was in the hospital, Mitchell says: “I’ve been there three times to see him – keep changing clothes to please him…” At the same time, her penchant for trench coats, tailored pants, simple knits, and loafers with socks in 1950s New York—an aesthetic she maintained in Paris into the ’60s—made a kind of statement at a time when womenswear was dominated by perky dresses, hats, and nylons.
