OKeeffe once said that her penchant for black was Essays - Clothing

O'Keeffe once said that her penchant for black was not a preference but a practicality: if she started picking out colors for dresses, she would have no time for painting. She could be coy in that way, especially about the trappings of traditional feminine identitydenying that her flower paintings bore any resemblance to female genitalia, bristling at others' attempts to label her a feminist. ("One is a good painter or one is not, and that sex is not the basic of this difference," she replied when Judy Chicago asked her to participate in an anthology on women artists, in 1972.) O'Keeffe was reluctant to stand for anything other than herself, yet she was open to the worldits places, people, and ideas. According to the art historian Wanda M. Corn, who guest-curated "Living Modern," O'Keeffe's style was influenced early on by the writings of the feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose book"The Dress of Women," from 1915, argued that women should free themselves from restrictive fashion norms by adopting masculine styles of dress. In New Mexico, where, in 1940, O'Keeffe bought a home at the Ghost Ranch, the site of some of her most iconic images, she wore denim and painted the landscapes, writing to tell Murdock Pemberton, the art critic for The New Yorker, that she loved to wear a shirt he had given her paired with bluejeans: "I rather think they are our only national costumes," she said. She honed her style by borrowing (today we might call it appropriating) from other nations, too. When she travelled to Japan, she returned with kimonos, one of which she is wearing, open and loose, in a Paul Strand portrait from 1918. On a visit to Spain, she bought a skirt suit from Cristobal Balenciaga, his impeccable couturier instincts on display in its perfectly tailored arms and waist. She hemmed dresses as hemlines rose.