An artist’s outfit can send any number of messages. Georgia O’Keefe in her austere blacks and whites, struck a seemingly deliberate, stark juxtaposition with the cloudy, pastel-toned washes of her southwestern paintings. Picasso in his jaunty Breton stripe, echoed the ten homme en tricot rayé canvases he made while residing in the small French seaside town of Royan. Photographer Bill Cunningham pedaled through New York City in his French sanitation worker’s kit—a minimalist, utilitarian jacketCK that allowed him to disappear behind his camera, its own fashion statement.
If you’ve been walking the streets of Manhattan for enough years, you might have caught a glimpse of another artist in a signature ensemble. For about two decades the multidisciplinary artist Taryn Simon has been wearing a simple skirt that hits just below the knee, held up by two substantial suspenders, with a three-quarter length, slightly balloon sleeve blouse beneath. There are adjustments—different weights and materials—as well as evolutions. A few years back, Simon, who made the first of these outfits herself but since deployed a seamstress, added aprons with a deep, wide pockets—large enough to hold a coffee thermos—and providing spare material to open a grimy door handle, a boon for germophobes, she jokes when I meet her in the studio of her friend, the photographer Thomas Dozol. Here, dozens, maybe hundreds, of these outfits in an array of colors and tones have been removed from Simon’s bedroom closet and arrayed on racks.
Simon’s consideration, at the outset, was practical: Much of her work is photographic, and Simon needed pockets for her light meter, and also her wallet. (She used to tuck the latter into a boot: “I never wanted to carry a bag.”) But there was a deeper consideration as well, to present herself respectably, to show consideration but not excess formality. Some of Simon’s best known work—portraits of men exonerated from crimes by DNA evidence, for instance, or photographs of Ukrainian orphans—seem to necessitate an air of composed respect. When she thinks about what has happened to these outfits, she thinks about “the world leaders they’ve stood in front of.” The writer and illustrator Juman Malouf,a friend from when Simon was an undergraduate at Brown University, tells me she had a uniform even then—“very different from the one she wears now: a pair of electric blue leather pants and a black tank top.” This one, says Malouf, “will be the outfit she wears when she is one hundred. She will be buried in it.”
