The original 1975 documentary Grey Gardens, a quirky little film that surprised its makers as well as its stars when it became so legendarily popular, is on the surface an odd choice for a fashion manual. Following the later years of the eccentric aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Grey Gardens is set in the decaying behemoth of a family estate in East Hampton. 

Yet the subjects of the film are what make it so arresting. Little Edie Beale, the first cousin of Jackie O. and socialite Lee Radziwill, was in her 50s when the documentary was filmed, yet at all times she displays a youthful exuberance for entertaining the filmmakers David and Albert Maysles. She also proves herself to be a serious and committed lover of fashion, even in the face of abject poverty while living with her mother, Big Edie.

Movie poster for "Grey Gardens," 1975.

The images of Little Edie in her creative and strangely practical ensembles have inspired designers as diverse as John Galliano and Marc Jacobs. But if you’re only casually acquainted with the film, you’d have every right to wonder: What does high fashion have to do with a couple of disgraced society ladies?

The answer is nuanced. In the iconic opening scene of the original documentary, Little Edie shows off what seems to be a random assortment of clothing to wear around the yard (which you can see here). She pronounces, “This is the best thing to wear for the day.” She explains to the filmmakers that her mother wanted her to don a kimono, but instead she’s wearing pantyhose under a short skirt and shorts under the pantyhose, a brown sweater, and a long head scarf affixed with a gold brooch. She also points out that you can then remove the skirt to wear as a cape if need be.

“I have to think these things up, you know?” she says in her perfectly preserved upper crust accent.

The scene was lovingly re-imagined in a new fictional version of the film starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as the Beales, currently showing on HBO through the end of May. (You can check for local listings here.)

Cat Thomas, the costume designer for the remake, has spoken of the difficulty in capturing Little Edie’s distinct style sense, particularly because so much of her wardrobe was DIY: “There is a blue sweater that she wears as a vest, and then later when she loses her hair she wears it on her head, and we were never able to find anything that worked and looked similar to the documentary, so we had that knit for us.”

But one of the most arresting images from both the original and the remake is Little Edie in her full-length mink coat. A still from the documentary depicting Little Edie in her coat graced the official movie poster because it embodied a pointedly stark contrast: luxury juxtaposed with decrepitude.

The remake includes the scene where she receives the coat as a glamorous gift from Julius Krug, a married suitor (played by Daniel Baldwin). So when she wears the mink in her later years, enclosed in her family’s crumbling estate at a time they were selling off all their worldly possessions to afford food, the question strikes the viewer: Why did she keep the coat? And how, in the face of a mansion infested with raccoons and fleas, did she keep it looking so nice?

It’s possible that at heart, we are all creatures of comfort. No matter how far we fall from grace, we still want our little luxuries that make us feel human and special. Everyone has that one nice thing that they can never imagine selling because, even as superficial as it sounds, that object is your connection to who you were or how far you’ve come. Little Edie giving up the mink would be giving up her glorious past — and if you watch the documentary, you can see in her eyes that there was never any chance of that.