As Rose implied, Mitchell was not an clearly trendy individual. It appears extremely believable she felt the identical approach about garments as she did about her work. “My work don’t have anything to do with what’s in and what’s out,” she advised the New York Occasions in 1991, talking from Vétheuil, France, the place she had lived since 1968.
It’s a sentiment echoed by the gallerist John Cheim, who knew Mitchell in her later years. “Like her work, she is anti-style, very a lot an genuine insurgent,” he says. “She wore what she favored—denims, corduroys, turtlenecks, untucked Oxford shirts, suede athletic sneakers, cashmere scarves—and he or she may put on this anyplace, anytime and look sharp and imposing.”
The primary time he clocked her, it was in Manhattan, following a efficiency of Parade on the Met Opera in 1981. Cheim says Mitchell was sporting “a broad-shouldered, waist-length fur ‘monkey coat’ and slacks, with giant, darkish glasses. She struck me as a personality out of a Nineteen Forties Hollywood movie—maybe Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, or Barbara Stanwyck.”
Born in Chicago, Mitchell grew up in a wealthy household. Her father, James Mitchell, was a doctor and president of the American Dermatological Affiliation (he was additionally an newbie watercolorist), whereas her mom, Marion Strobel, was a co-editor of Poetry journal, which printed the likes of Ezra Pound. As a lady, Mitchell was a debutante, diver, and champion determine skater who beloved dungarees and mannish shirts. She found Van Gogh at age six and wrote poems, certainly one of which included the road: “Her eyebrows have been plucked and he or she wore French heels.”
The quirks of Mitchell’s model may very well be partly defined by the starkly completely different circles that she moved inside. “I believe there was a divide that she was making an attempt to navigate for a few years between her household, who anticipated her to be a correct younger woman, and her personal rebellious streak and internal pull towards the artist neighborhood,” says Sarah Roberts, senior director of curatorial affairs on the Basis. It was commonplace for Mitchell and her sister to vary outfits a number of occasions a day: In a letter she wrote to her ex-lover Mike Goldberg at 28, when her father was within the hospital, Mitchell says: “I’ve been there thrice to see him – hold altering garments to please him…” On the similar time, her penchant for trench coats, tailor-made pants, easy knits, and loafers with socks in Nineteen Fifties New York—an aesthetic she maintained in Paris into the ’60s—made a sort of assertion at a time when womenswear was dominated by perky clothes, hats, and nylons.
