Georgia On My Mind

Photography by Johanna Nyholm, styling by Lauren T Franks, set design by Tara Holmes

20th century Modernist artist Georgia O’Keefe’s love of nature was fostered from an early age, growing up on her parents’ farm in rural Wisconsin, surrounded by wheat fields. “I can still see the enormous loads of hay coming into the barns in the evening—I’ve never seen loads of hay like that anywhere else.” Wisconsin was also where she began her lifelong obsession with painting flowers. “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else,” she believed.

“To See Takes Time…”, words by Suzanne Wateridge

Following many years living against type in New York with her husband, she started to spend more and more time in New Mexico and when he died, she moved there permanently. “As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I’d never seen anything like it before but it fitted to me exactly. There’s something that’s in the air, it’s just different. The sky is different, the stars are different, the wind is different”. She loved the arid desert landscape, the mountains, the simplicity of her life there. 

A keen observer of nature, when she was at home one of her favourite activities was walking along the beach picking up shells, and she filled her home with them, often drawing her favourites. From time to time, she would take off across the desert, sketching as she travelled, spending hours painting outside exposed to the hot sun and winds. 

Her fashion sense was almost as iconic as her famed flower paintings, with her love of monochrome tones and clean, minimal tailoring invariably accompanied by a sturdy-brimmed, black gaucho hat. According to curator Wanda Corn: “She had an internal need to always look under-decorated, almost elementary…”, her keen eye for the clean forms of objects from nature reflected in her tailoring. 

An early pioneer of sustainable fashion in some ways, she made her own clothes from natural materials such as wool and cotton, predominantly in black with touches of white here and there. This twin sensibility, stripping back nature literally to its bare bones at times, married with a pared down aesthetic in her tailoring, was where inspiration was taken for this story. 

Sculptures fashioned from straw; seedheads and grasses; leaves and tendrils snaking around human forms; smooth, weighty rocks. It is nature co-existing harmoniously alongside humans, as it should be allowed to do, each blending into the other: a concept that O’Keefe would no doubt have wholeheartedly approved of.

Team Credits

Photographer
Johanna Nyholm

Stylist
Lauren T Franks

Set Design
Tara Holmes

Hair
Hiroki Kojima

Makeup
Roberta Kearsey

Model
Amanda Ljunggren at Storm

Words
Suzanne Wateridge

Clothing Credits

Page 1: Dress by Cecilie Bahnsen
Page 2: Hat by Maison Michel, coat by Cecilie Bahnsen (left); full look by Gabriela Hearst for Chloé (right)
Page 3: Dress by Roland Mouret, shoes by Penelope Chilvers
Page 4: Hat by Maison Michel, coat by Cecilie Bahnsen
Page 5: Dress by Palmer Harding
Page 6: Coat and dress by Cecilie Bahnsen (left); shirt and vest by Riley Studio, skirt by Filippa K, shoes by G.H. Bass and co. (right)
Page 7: Dress by Simone Rocha, shoes by Penelope Chilvers
Page 8: Dress and trousers by Toogood, shoes by G.H. Bass and co (left); coat and dress by Cecilie Bahnsen (right)