Despite Sweltering Temperatures, Diane Keaton Celebrated J.Crew’s 40th Anniversary in Her Signature Buttoned-Up Look

In New York City, on the day after Labor Day, highs were in the 90s. J.Crew had invited the city’s most fashionable set to Pier 17, where 40 years ago the brand opened its first store. The Strokes had been invited to entertain the crowd. And under this velvet layer of humidity, Diane Keaton wore enormous black platform boots and a top buttoned up to her neck under a coat topped with a belt. 

“I just need belts,” Keaton said, reasonably, the morning before the party, while still in air conditioning. “I like loafers, things like that. I love turtlenecks, obviously. All of this is to disguise myself underneath the greatness of the clothes that I get to wear.”

Keaton, actor, icon, and sometimes J.Crew model, spoke to why the brand has become synonymous with American fashion over the decades. “Well, they’re not fussy. What they are is they’re really interested and they have their thoughts and they have their ideas, and it’s pretty damn good,” Keaton said. “And so to be part of that in any way, shape, or form has been really, really charming for me in a great way. Because they are curious. They work hard. They make really good choices, I think, that are really special. So it’s just timeless.”

Timeless, curious, hardworking, and great at making good choices are all excellent descriptors of the actor herself, in terms of both her work and her style. Keaton, a woman so committed to being herself that not even a heat advisory could get her to ditch the jacket, is only ever exactly who she is. You see her and you know it’s her, and from that commitment to her signatures comes the timelessness. It’s an amazing trick that few can pull off, and it came from a source close to home. 

“Me and clothing has always been completely about my mother,” Keaton said. Her mother was Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall, a Mrs. Los Angeles and her daughter’s hero. “She didn’t have a lot of clothes at all, and she could kind of do the sewing machine bit. And what we could do is that she would take me to these old—those kind of places where it’s the Goodwill kind of clothing…. Those times, for me, were just so incredible…. It comes from her. So I miss her. I loved her so much.”

The moment that it started for Keaton, this love of fashion via her mom, can be attributed materially to Halloween, which makes sense. When else can a child fully express themselves with style and nurture any flight of fancy and imagination? Wearing a costume makes literal the transformative power of clothes—all the better if one’s parent knows their way around a sewing machine.

“She would drum up something out of somewhere,” Keaton said. “It was like, ‘Come on, can you figure out something? Can you think of something, Mom? If we buy the clothes, can you cut it up right?’ She did those things. Do you understand how lucky I was?”

There at J.Crew’s anniversary party was the product of such a lucky upbringing more than 70 years later. Even among so much competition—Julian Casablancas onstage, the New York Fashion Week regulars, and Joshua Jackson of Dawson’s Creek (and of the famous ’90s J.Crew catalog featuring that show’s cast members)—Keaton stood out in yet another fully realized look. It turns out that a crowd makes true originals easier to spot.