the Edie look

The Edie look is an appearance modeled on Edie Sedgwick that circulated as a recognizable style beyond the person who inspired it. Andy Warhol’s diary captures both its appeal and its slippage: at a 1985 party, women repeatedly greeted him as variations on Edie, yet he thought they had got her hair wrong.

An Image Repeated

The look appears in the diary as a form of imitation, not a carefully defined fashion formula. At a sixties-themed party at the Palladium, Warhol noticed that every girl who said hello seemed to be presenting herself as an Edie. The repeated resemblance made the reference easy to recognize, while his insistence that the styling was incorrect showed how much the image depended on particular details.

The Hair as a Test of Recognition

Warhol singled out the hair: Edie’s was brushed straight back, dyed very pale, and cut to suggest a boy’s style. The women at the party, he observed, commonly added bangs or otherwise changed it. The distinction mattered because the imitation announced its source while altering the very feature he considered definitive. The result was not simply a collection of similar hairstyles; it was a social performance measured against Warhol’s memory of Edie.

From Personal Style to Public Costume

A separate diary entry from July 1985 records a girl arriving at the office with the Edie look. Warhol told her he could do nothing for her; he thought she expected him to wine and dine her and change her life. The episode places the look within a broader expectation that access to a famous image-maker might transform the person wearing the image. That expectation sits alongside Interview’s promotion of previously unseen faces and its promise of magazine exposure: appearance could help someone enter public view, even when resemblance alone did not guarantee assistance.

At the Palladium, the repeated Edie references made the look part of a collective revival of sixties imagery. Warhol’s sharp distinction between the original hair and its imitations records the tension at its center: a style can remain legible as an icon even as repetition changes the details that made it recognizable.