"Edie" Style

The “Edie” look is an imitable fashion image associated with Edie Sedgwick, but in Andy Warhol’s diary it is more than a hairstyle: it is a test of whether an imitation has caught the original’s particular effect. In 1985, he saw women adopting the look and repeatedly judged their versions wrong, specifying the straight-back, boyish, very pale hair that they failed to reproduce. The gap between a circulating style and its source gives the look its significance: fame makes an image available for copying, but copying does not guarantee recognition or access to the life imagined behind it.

A Style in Circulation

The diary places the look within a wider culture of beauty, celebrity, and novelty. Warhol was impressed by beauty, classical and innovative talent, people who did something first, and conspicuous nerve. His magazine Interview helped turn that appetite for new faces into a working system: young, previously unpublished beauties appeared in its pages, and the promise of magazine exposure drew people to the office. In that setting, a recognizable look could travel as readily as a name or photograph, carrying the appeal of a famous image into new encounters.

The return of sixties camp also frames the look as part of a recycled fashion moment. After drinking champagne at the office, Warhol and colleagues took a limousine to the opening of a Superman shop, where he thought the scene looked like the sixties again and wondered how often camp would be brought back. The observation makes revival itself part of the style’s context: the past returns as something people can wear and stage, while its significance depends on how closely the new version resembles what it claims to revive.

The Original and Its Imitations

At the Palladium’s sixties party in July 1985, Warhol noticed that every girl who greeted him was an “Edie.” He was not convinced by the resemblance. He said that people usually got the hair wrong, giving themselves bangs, whereas Sedgwick’s hair was brushed straight back, dyed boyishly, and made very pale. The specific distinction matters: the look was not simply long hair or a general sixties appearance, but a combination whose details, in Warhol’s account, made it legible as Sedgwick’s image.

His criticism also reveals how imitation can spread while losing the features that define its model. The women at the party were identifying themselves with Sedgwick, yet Warhol saw their modifications as a failure to reproduce her look. The label had become widely recognizable; the precise form remained, to him, elusive. His insistence on the original’s details turns fashion judgment into a distinction between a name used as a ready-made identity and an appearance whose effect depends on its particular arrangement.

The Look as a Promise of Transformation

The diary records a different encounter on July 15, 1985, when a young woman came to see Warhol wearing the Edie look. He told her there was nothing he could do for her. He guessed that she wanted him to wine and dine her and change her life, but the diary does not establish what she had actually asked for; the hoped-for rescue remains his interpretation, not a confirmed request.

Placed beside the Palladium scene, this brief refusal gives the look a social consequence beyond its visual details. It could serve as an appeal to the person associated with the original and as a way of imagining transformation through proximity to celebrity. Warhol’s response draws a limit: recognizing the reference did not mean he would provide the attention or life change he believed the visitor wanted. The diary preserves both the power of the image to summon expectations and the distance between adopting it and receiving what it seems to promise.