The Oscar-winning actor Diane Keaton, star of beloved films from Annie Hall to Something’s Gotta Give, The First Wives Club to The Godfather, has died at the age of 79, her family confirmed on October 11, 2025. Here, Vogue pays tribute to her life in style.
Vogue first highlighted the peculiar genius of Diane Keaton in its ’70s culture pages—calling out her turns in Sleeper in 1974 and The Godfather: Part II the following year (“Just a really terrific movie in every way”). It’s only in 1977, though, that the magazine properly introduced her to readers as “the woman superspecialstar of American movies” following the release of both Annie Hall and Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
“She’s the mistress of the ditsy exclamation, of the indecisive sentence, the fade-out silence,” Vogue’s December issue declared. “Self-apology is what Diane seems to be about. That is, until you watch her work on screen or sing a song (she’s said to be cutting an LP), and then there is no doubt to be seen in her: she’s the best. In Diane Keaton’s dithers is all the strength of American women. Oscar, your ’78 name is Diane.”
While her LP never materialized, Vogue’s Academy Awards prediction would prove accurate: Keaton collectsed the top prize at that year’s ceremony in Giorgio Armani tailoring, a pale-pink peony in her lapel. She gave her verdict on the outfit in Rizzoli’s 2024 monograph Fashion First: “Giorgio gave me a look that honored my love for blazers and layers while also reminding me how much I adored skirts—but maybe the socks I chose were just a little too ’80s…”
Said outfit, of course, echoed her on-screen style as Annie, whose “rueful, Chaplinesque, baggy-pants-and-vest look” struck a chord with an entire generation keen to leave behind the “rich hippy” feel of the late ’60s, as Vogue put it. The key to achieving the aesthetic? In a word: vintage.
“Even before the emergence of the Annie Hall style, the popularity of thrift shop clothes had hit the streets,” this magazine noted in an August 1978 interview with the film’s costume designer Ruth Morley. “Ethel Scull made the papers in New York a few years back when she appeared at a gathering of swells in a genuine ESSO workman’s coverall, and rock stars had popularized the slightly schizophrenic garb of cast-offs from other milieux. Lifestyles in general have grown less formal by quantum leaps, and individuality in clothing seems to be a badge for that by-now clichéd adage to ‘do your own thing.’ Women’s hard-won independence is reflected by their search for more personal and less dictatorial styles.”
For her part, Keaton had been a devotee of Goodwill since the early ’60s, calling its LA branches her “sanctuary” as a teenager. “Mom taught my sister Dorrie and me to rummage for the best and alter if needed,” she wrote in Fashion First. “Someone else’s junk was now our perfect treasure. Once home, we would put together outfits for the rest of the day, while discussing when we would go back to the Goodwill.” Before she had even left Santa Ana College for Manhattan, she had developed her distinctive taste—as evidenced by her request to wear a bowler hat to her prom. “My mother said, ‘Maybe another time, Diane.’”
Here, Vogue looks back at the star’s most memorable early fashion moments.
Photo: Getty Images1/12Keaton cites Cary Grant as the inspiration for her lifelong hat obsession; her adopted daughter, Dexter, is even named after his character, C K Dexter Haven, in A Philadelphia Story. She has at least 40 hats in her collectsion now—her favorite being a bowler from Baron.
Photo: Getty Images2/12Vogue hailed these particular frames as “this season’s Ford in sunglasses shapes…” in its November 1977 issue. “Diane Keaton wore them, funnily, in Annie Hall. John Chancellor has had them for years. What? A certain-shaped glasses frame—strictly traditional—that’s been tagged ‘Ful-Vue’, ‘retro’, the Brooks Bros look, [and] Wall Street specs.”
Photo: Getty Images3/12Keaton began her career in the musical Hair—in which she famously refused to take her clothes off—before starring in both the Broadway play and film adaptation of Play It Again, Sam.
Photo: Getty Images4/12“Style is shaky territory for me,” Keaton told Joan Juliet Buck in a Vanity Fair profile in 1987. “It makes me nervous. Maybe I’m only style and no content.”
Photo: Getty Images5/12Among Keaton’s more endearing traits: the fact that her chosen beverage is a glass of red—specifically Layer Cake cabernet—with ice. Here, she’s seen perched at a bar on the set of Looking for Mr Goodbar.
Photo: Getty Images6/12In the wake of Annie Hall’s release, Women’s Wear Daily declared it “Annie Fall, a season of “jackets, blazers and spencers,” “tiny ties and bow ties,” and “Fedorable hats.”
Photo: Getty Images7/12“Turtlenecks are particularly underrated,” Keaton writes in her memoir Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty. “Buy one. I dare you. Give one a try. Turtlenecks cushion, shield, and insulate a person from harm. Never let a turtleneck’s collar sag. Get smart and sew stays at both side seams. It will keep your turtleneck gravity-free. Make sure the fabric isn’t too bulky, unless you want a linebacker’s neck. If you take my advice, trust me, your head will be framed to perfection.”
Photo: Getty Images8/12“Well then, this is terrific,” Keaton began her Oscar acceptance speech at the 1978 Academy Awards. “It’s simply terrific.”
Photo: Getty Images9/12Keaton was paid famously little for her turn as Kay in The Godfather, taking home just $6,000—equivalent to less than $50,000 today. “I was delighted to get it,” she told The New York Times in 1972. “After all, who am I?”
Photo: Getty Images10/12Posing with Michael Caine in a promotional still for 1976’s Harry and Walter Go to New York, a period drama heist set in gilded age New York.
Photo: Getty Images11/12If there’s a word to describe Keaton, it’s whimsical. As a girl, she would go out into her family’s Santa Ana garden and sing to the moon each night, while she would busy herself on weekends by penning her own pantomimes inspired by the likes of Bonnie and Clyde.
Photo: Getty Images12/12“Sometimes she will leap into a sudden attempt to explain her own habit of apologising, at the same time sheltering behind a Scotch terrier’s growth of fringe over her forehead; she uses it, perhaps, as some women use dark glasses,” wrote novelist Penelope Gilliatt in a New Yorker profile of Keaton from 25 December 1978.
