Knickers, Amish Vests, and Rare Buttons: Painter Jamie Wyeth on How His Art Influences His Personal Style

Jamie Wyeth was only 20 when Jaqueline Kennedy and other relatives of JFK approached the artist about painting the official portrait of the late president. Wyeth demurred, but agreed instead to paint an unofficial portrait—one that would remain in the artist’s private collection until he gifted it to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2014. Save for a four-year stint in the White House—then President Biden requisitioned the portrait for his personal study during his presidency—it has remained there. 

The first time I saw Wyeth’s portrait of JFK in person, I was roughly the same age he was when he painted it. My family ventured into the city one night and on a lark, stopped into the MFA. That visit coincided with the museum’s Wyeth retrospective, an exhibit which celebrated N.C. Wyeth, his son Andrew, and his grandson Jamie. I was at that decisive point in life, when my taste for literature, music, and art was starting to coalesce around more concrete principles instead of trend or temporal relevance. I returned to the museum a handful of times on my own just to visit the Wyeth exhibit because for the first time, I understood what it meant for art to speak to you. I was taken with Jamie’s paintings in particular—the gentle honesty and vulnerability in his subjects’ faces; the way his brushstrokes immersed you in the crisp Maine air. Ten years later, Jamie Wyeth remains not only my favorite artist but a rather unexpected style muse for his unapologetically unique dress sense.

And so, it was quite surreal when, on a rainy New England morning this spring, my phone rang, and Wyeth had agreed to speak to me about his very personal wardrobe and more.  

Knickers, Amish Vests, and a Bevy of Buttons

“I couldn’t be happier to be back in the lighthouse,” he begins. Just back from New York where he was in town to attend the reopening of the Frick, Wyeth was settling back into his day-to-day life on the island. “My only other inhabitants are the gulls,” he says with a chuckle.

Raised in the Brandywine Valley in Pennsylvania, Wyeth is the third generation of an American dynasty. These days, he divides his time between his family farm in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and his home on Monhegan Island in Maine, though he spends the most time in a decommissioned lighthouse on an island about a mile offshore from Tenants Harbor. There is, of course, the occasional trip to New York City so his sartorial choices must cover quite a bit of ground.

Wyeth has always been an impeccably dressed man, whether donning black tie at the White House or a or a chambray shirt and chinos on the farm. Most recently, he has taken a shine to sporting knickers, pairing them with rainboots, or vibrant socks and practical shoes. He has an affinity for vests, craggy tweed blazers and relaxed cotton sport coats. I was curious how his style has evolved throughout his life, from rubbing elbows with a list of bold-faced names on the Upper East Side to spending most of his time in the cotton-wool refuge of rural Maine. 

“The knicker thing, that really [began] with living on the island,” he explains. “I wear boots a lot so I would cut my trousers off at the knee. So now I have this wonderful seamstress here in Maine and I say, ‘Well let’s just turn them into knickers.’ Why not?” He also remembers seeing photographs of his grandfather in knickers and loving it. “But really, it was out of the fact that I just kept stuffing my trousers into my rubber boots. I send her old trousers covered with paint and she knickers them!” He laughs and says that now he even wears his signature knickers when he’s off the island. At the opening of the Frick, someone even pointed out to him how many of the subjects in the paintings were wearing knickers, just like him. 

Wyeth is both incredibly intentional about what he wears and equally unpretentious. I ask where he likes to shop these days. “Maine has great rummage sales,” he says. “You can get things for 25 cents!” Like his knickers, this too traces a patrilineal line. “My father used to tell a great story—he had this one jacket that he bought for 25 cents, and he would go to fancy places in it, of course. One day, someone asked him where he’d gotten it, and he opened it up to check the label and there was the name of the man it had been made for.” 

There’s also an ingenuity to how he dresses. In addition to having his trousers turned into knickers, he tasks his seamstress with creating vests in the same style of the Amish vests his father was fond of, which have a higher collar and buttons down the front. To this combo, he adds a turtleneck and is then ready to take on the day. “A big impetus for me is that I don’t want to have to think about what I’m going to wear when I get out of bed, so I have kind of a uniform.”

To everything, he adds his own flair, namely buttons. He tells me he has caches of buttons stored all around his home of varying sizes, shapes, colors and materials. Adorning his garments with mismatched buttons selected from his ever-growing collection is a small but meaningful touch he enthusiastically shares. “One of the great tragedies of my life was when Tender Buttons in New York closed,” he says. “It was one of those wonderful button stores and I would just go in there and buy thousands of buttons and attach them to various garments.”

In Costume 

Wyeth’s personal style is also in direct communication with his art. 

“I’m often my own model,” he says. “And so, putting various things on is part of my work.” The notion of a costume is one he has an especially emotional tether to as well. “I’ve always loved costumes. As children, my grandfather’s studio was full of costumes that he used in his illustrations and that we would dress up in.” Halloween was a national holiday in the Wyeth household, he says, because it was the one day of the year where they could go out in their costumes in public and blend right in. 

Costumes to Wyeth though, are about more than playing dress up as a child. He recalls his time spent with Warhol and Nureyev, in particular, who he says lived their life both publicly and privately often in some iteration of a costume. “Warhol certainly wore a costume to a degree. I spent quite a few years with him, and it always seemed natural to me.” Of Nureyev, he says he was always struck by how, while other performers might opt for pedestrian clothing off-stage, Nureyev was never one to wear ordinary clothes. “It had a profound effect on me.” 

And so now, every day Jamie gets dressed is an opportunity to continue that legacy. Clothing is an integral part of his life so that is reflected in his art—and vice versa. “I hate this idea that painting is oh I’m going to my studio to paint,” he says. “I want to paint all the time, I paint everywhere. And so, the clothes that I wear are part of the painting, there’s no separation. It’s not that I study and plan [what I wear] but I make choices. Each drawer is full of vests and buttons, and I see it as part of my existence.” 

The Way Life Should Be 

What New England is and what it means to be a New Englander are all too often posited as a thought experiment, as a lifestyle or an aesthetic. It’s something far more tangible. It’s endurance and resilience. It’s also a simplicity that reframes the context of luxury, of peace. There’s something profoundly representative of what it feels like to be in Maine reflected in Jamie’s work, and in his outlook on life, the juxtaposition of natural beauty with earnest grit.

For many, Maine is a summer refuge—beaches with powdery sand and glinting grey-blue water intermingled with bucolic topography; mountains, lake houses. But Wyeth loves Maine year round. “The summer’s so short anyway,” he says. “And I love it in the winter; I almost prefer it in the winter.” The less curated image of Maine and the coastline is an oft explored subject in Wyeth’s work. His depiction of the seven deadly sins as seagulls came to him in a dream. “I mean, they’re evil!” he says. “They eat one another. And of course, people have always painted them as if they’re doves and they’re not. If you look at them, they have snake eyes. Which makes me thrilled. I mean, I’m just fascinated.” 

There is a weatherworn honesty to Maine; its seasons each their own trials. If you love Maine, it will love you back but that means weathering the storms, literally and figuratively. “Maudlin” is the word Jamie used, discussing the insularity of certain locales and the visibility that brings. Everything is laid bare: divorces, deaths, illnesses. It’s a side of New England not witnessed by those who spend three sun-soaked months there. But living somewhere year-round where others only summer begets a vulnerability that inducts you into a club far more exclusive than any yacht or country club. 

“[When something happens] it affects everybody,” he says. “You can sense it, and it sort of vibrates. You can’t avoid it.” He likens it to the bobbing lobster buoys – charming and beautiful from above, but there’s an undercurrent. “It [can be] a very tough life, but it’s wondrous,” he says. “And the undercurrent is so much more interesting.” 

On the island, Wyeth is often at the mercy of the elements, and happily so. He talks vividly about watching storms roll in from the top of the lighthouse; watching them churn the ocean from his perch. “The sound of it was like 10 trains rushing through!” He receives his mail only a few times a week and has a small rowboat that he uses himself to get to and from the mainland when need be. Fishermen leave fresh catches at the end of his dock, and he grows his own vegetables on the island. And with that simplicity, he is the picture of contentment. The solitude nurtures his creativity; the isolation informs how he collects and consumes. “That’s what’s so fascinating about living on an island,” he says. “Everything you carry to an island takes an effort to get it here, even a button.”