How Diane Keaton redefined the movie star look

The 78-year-old actress has gathered a voluminous selection of her most celebrated, most treasured and most questionable looks in a new book, “Fashion First,” annotated with her warm, witty reflections. Most people couldn’t get away with publishing a book of hundreds of pictures of themselves across more than 300 pages, let alone one sprinkled with love notes from Kris Jenner, Miley Cyrus, Nancy Meyers and Sarah Jessica Parker. But Keaton’s self-effacement provides an unexpectedly insightful foray into the unconventional mind of a legendary actress. She is one of the rare people who can put adequate words to clothes.

Keaton, who agreed to answer questions by email, wrote that her style was shaped by her mother and her adoration of golden-era Hollywood stars.

You can see her imprint on Katie Holmes’s kooky and soft layers; on Emma Stone’s whimsical way of wearing menswear-inspired clothes. Even Blake Lively’s much-admired wackadoo tailoring in “A Simple Favor” is a Keatonism. But it’s not just the worlds of fashion and Hollywood that Keaton has influenced: she also inspired the coastal grandmother trend; yanked Marlene Dietrich’s risqué adaptation of menswear into something modern, mischievous and easy to copy; and helped sculpt the look of the female corporate power broker in the 1980s in “Baby Boom.”

Keaton has ended up on as many worst-dressed lists as best-dressed ones, something she admirably embraces. One chapter, titled “WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG,” is a roundup of her worst looks, with hilarious commentary: “Some of these outfits make me wonder if my family was worried about me.”

Still, if Keaton has a reputation for playing dotty or ditzy heroines, her clothes reinforce that her persona is far from irrational. There is a method — of experimentation, of openness even when hiding herself with turtlenecks, hats and gloves. When ask which celebrity’s style she admires, she writes, “Karl Lagerfeld, because he wasn’t afraid to cover up and neither am I!”

Keaton has fashioned herself, literally and figuratively, as a movie star, mixing the tailored fluidity of Grant and Katharine Hepburn with the fascination with invention that also defined their performances. Erica Barry, her character in “Something’s Gotta Give,” may share some of Annie Hall’s zaniness, but they are as distinctive personalities as the profiles she drew as a pleasure-seeking schoolteacher in “Looking For Mr. Goodbar” and as Kay Adams, the moral compass of “The Godfather” trilogy. (She considers the “The Godfather” as the best-dressed film in history: “spectacular. Every item of clothing really helped tell the story, except my wig; my wig was not a good moment for me and far too heavy.”)

If a good costume helps a film’s character come to life, Keaton’s clothes have helped build her reputation as an actor who is at once approachable and virtuosic.

The archetypal movie star look is one of sequins, big hair and gowns, of a trussed-up kind of femininity that is impenetrable and even unforgiving. That level of glamour can be astounding, breathtaking and even tragic — the slinky lineage that ties Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, Angelina Jolie and Viola Davis together. More recently, it’s come to be something purified, almost sci-fi — gowns that cling like the gilding on an award statuette, faces that are ironically immobile given the emotive job they are tasked with. Costumes, whether on the red carpet or on-screen or even the clothes an actor wears on the street, are more and more the carefully strategized expression of corporate interests. That can be fascinating — that monumentality of Hollywood, of its capacity to touch every sort of American power — but it also squeezes out the bumpy realism that movies and the people who star in them are also responsible for bringing to the screen.

Keaton’s is a style born not of designer clothes, self-mythologizing and dealmaking, but from curiosity and charm. She mixes big-name designers such as Lauren — “my first intro to a great tweed suit and I still wear them today” — with little-known designers such as Paul Harnden, who makes quirky, fusty clothes that would make the Artful Dodger nasty with envy. Not one to shop online, she says she still uses Goodwill, purchasing from there as well as donating her clothes, and often stops people on the street to ask where they bought their garments. Egg, the London-based retailer of playful and simple clothes by small designers, is a favorite: “They just understood me when I walked in the door.”

Charm may be the most salient quality of Keaton’s wardrobe, the glue that makes her thrown-together ensembles into something more charismatic than the sum of their parts. As she writes alongside one picture, explaining a gingham coat styled with orange fingerless gloves and brooch of coordinating flowers, “That was just me being insane.” In a chapter chronicling her paparazzi images, she writes, “If I were to describe my so-called ‘street style,’ I would say, GET RID OF MY ENTIRE BODY … Sadly, I need a nose and a mouth to live and breathe, but that doesn’t mean I need to show them off.” Fashion is not life or death for Keaton — it’s a way of looking at the world. By looking at how atypical her clothing choices have been, we can understand why her acting is so special.

As Lauren writes in his introduction, “Diane has worn my clothes many times, but she has always made them totally her own.” Hats off — or perhaps, in honor of Keaton, hats on — to that.