Courtesy Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers
Yale Collection of American Literature
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
New Haven

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This stunning studio photograph captures Gertrude and Alice’s sartorial makeover in the late 1920s. Beginning with Stein’s radical haircut of 1926, the women created an homme-femme style, a lesbian mode of dressing still in fashion today. Stein, in a solid-colored suit, flat shoes, and fedora, stands next to Toklas, who looks like a peacock in her floral outfit, long earrings, heeled shoes, and ultrafeminine hat and handbag. They posed comfortably as a couple, without any of the dissembling that marked photographs of the two of them in earlier years.

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