Was anyone ever more endearing than Diane Keaton?

She was one of a kind.

She thought herself a misfit, and for all the women who quietly identified as such, she was a heroine. For quirky, eccentric, insecure, creative women everywhere, she was a goddess.

Women like me.

A friend you just knew you would somehow connect with.

Diane Keaton spoke to all who didn’t quite fit into traditional conventions. Vulnerable with strength. Effortlessly stylish, she was a self-effacing beauty who made the unconventional seem so easy, likable, stylish, and more than okay.

Offbeat was good. Who could not love someone who was a self-described “oddball” In a world of artifice, she was the real deal in all her warm, glorious quirkiness.

Annie Hall

I still have my Annie Hall era bowler hat.

Like so many young women in 1977, I began dressing in menswear.  An oversized vest, baggy trousers, a tie, and bowler hat. That was the year that every woman of a certain age wanted to look like Annie Hall.

On April 20th, 1977, I got up early to stand in line for the opening matinee of Annie Hall in  Manhattan.

The line at the New Yorker Theatre on 88th and Broadway was blocks long. I waited for close to two hours and would have waited three. To be in New York, in Woody Allen’s New York meant something at the time. He had yet to tarnish his reputation.

The film was a fictional treatment of a year in the early 70s when Woody and Allen lived together.

Allen’s humor had never fitted its subject better.

The audience began cheering Annie Hall with the first scene, when Annie and Alvy meet after a tennis game (she wearing men’s brown pants, an unpressed white shirt, a black vest, and a ridiculously long polka-dot tie, an outfit Diane might have found on the floor of her own closet). She starts to compliment him on his tennis, gets lost in one of her enchanted word-forests, then subsides into pretty embarrassment: “Oh, God, Annie … Well, oh, well …” And then the murmur of defeat: “La-de-dah, la-de-dah.”

Heartbreaking.

Did anyone doubt that young women across the country began looking into their mirrors trying to find just the right intonation with which to murmur “La-de-dah”?

Like other Annie Hall addicts, I returned to the movie theater three and four times. Allen fans like me could recite bits such as the one that shows Alvy and Annie, on a split screen, talking to their shrinks about the frequency with which they have sex. “Hardly ever,” says Alvy, aggrieved, “maybe three times a week.”

“All the time,” says Annie, fed up; “at least three times a week.”

Keaton, the actress, and the character she created was so unlike what we were accustomed to seeing on the big screen- a beautiful but insecure woman. But she did not seem dithery or dimwitted, merely enormously vulnerable and utterly uncalculating.

And so relatable.

Suddenly everyone looked like Annie Hall with the layered oversized clothing, men’s shirts vst and ties paired with loose-fitting trousers.  A bowler hat.

It launched a style trend challenging fashion norms with its menswear pieces. At a time when sexy disco style clothes were the rage this was pure androgyny.

Well La-De Dah!

All The Style That’s Fit To Print- Becoming Annie Hall

The Times ran a style piece on  Tuesday, July 12, 1977  to explain the look “The Hallmark of the Annie Hall Look”

The look went so mainstream that the New York Times even ran a style piece that summer to advise how to achieve it: “The Hallmark of the Annie Hall Look.”

“Take a hat—slouchy, too big for the head it’s on, and slightly punchy looking. Better still, take a man’s hat that pulls down deep and covers the forehead. The hat is a crucial ingredient, one of the keys to the Annie Hall look.”

“Annie Hall is, of course, the name of Woody Allen’s newest film. Annie Hall is also Diane Keaton, who, in the film, has the kind of flung‐together look that belies the infinite care and thought that went into creating it. Almost everything she wears is a curious mixture of raffish tomboy and femininity.”

“The look was designed for a girl who didn’t quite know who she was,” said Ruth Morley, the costume designer for the film. “The girl is little confused but not a hippy; she’s unusual, she’s trying to find herself.”

“The Annie Hall look is now popping up on the streets with amazing frequency—men’s shirts, several sizes too big, odd vests, loose, wide‐leg trousers or full, longish skirts. The mix of pieces is worn with an offhand nonchalance; part of the nonchalance is a wrinkled effect that gives one the impression that the clothes have never seen a hanger.”

“Despite the influence of men’s haberdashery, the look—perhaps because so much of it is oversized—often gives the wearer an appearance of fragility. It is tenderized men’s wear, slightly waifish, frequently romantic. Old‐fashioned shawls often cover the floppy shirts and little vests; bouquets of tiny flowers are sometimes tucked into necklines, and almost always hair is long, with stray tendrils or masses of waves. Occasionally, the hair is gathered and tucked under the hat.”

“The Annie Hall ingredients aren’t new; they simply had never before been brought together in a clearly definable way. Now that they have, the betting is that jeans and ‘T‐shirts will be in for some pretty stiff competition this fall.”

Goodbye

There was and will be no one like her.

Her brilliant genius will shine for generations.

We just weren’t ready for the light to dim so suddenly.

RIP Diane Keaton, October 11, 2025

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream