As Rose implied, Mitchell was not an clearly trendy individual. It appears extremely believable she felt the identical means 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 informed 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 footwear, cashmere scarves—and she or he might 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 massive, 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 woman, Mitchell was a debutante, diver, and champion determine skater who liked dungarees and mannish shirts. She found Van Gogh at age six and wrote poems, one among which included the road: “Her eyebrows have been plucked and she or he wore French heels.”
The quirks of Mitchell’s type could possibly be partly defined by the starkly completely different circles that she moved inside. “I believe there was a divide that she was attempting to navigate for a few years between her household, who anticipated her to be a correct younger woman, and her personal rebellious streak and interior pull towards the artist neighborhood,” says Sarah Roberts, senior director of curatorial affairs on the Basis. It was common 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 – preserve altering garments to please him…” On the identical 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 type of assertion at a time when womenswear was dominated by perky attire, hats, and nylons.
