A script from Annie Hall, rare fashion pieces, photographs, furniture and private objects: the Bonhams sale reveals Diane Keaton not as a Hollywood icon, but as a meticulous editor of atmospheres.
There are actresses whose style belongs to cinema, and then there are figures like Diane Keaton, whose aesthetic gradually escaped the screen to become a complete way of inhabiting the world, through clothes, interiors, books, photographs, architecture, and the careful choreography of objects. This spring, Bonhams unveils Diane Keaton: The Architecture of an Icon, a four-part auction dedicated to the legendary actress’s personal collection. More than a celebrity sale, it feels like entering the private visual diary of someone who edited her life with the same precision she brought to her most iconic roles.
Organized in collaboration with The Fine Art Group, the sale gathers more than 400 lots spanning fashion, contemporary art, movie memorabilia, photography, furniture, rare books, and deeply personal objects sourced from Keaton’s California home. Our favorite aspect of the auction is perhaps that it never collapses into nostalgia. Instead, it reveals Diane Keaton as something rarer: an editor of atmospheres. Someone who understood that style is less about accumulation than about rhythm, restraint, and tension.
The woman who reinvented tailoring
Among the standout pieces: the original Annie Hall script, still carrying traces of the film that permanently transformed women’s tailoring in popular culture, alongside Keaton’s signature hats, Ralph Lauren ties, Thom Browne tailoring, Comme des Garçons silhouettes, and Prada coats. The wardrobe section reads almost like a manifesto for contemporary dressing. Long before “quiet luxury” became an exhausted internet phrase, Diane Keaton had already built a vocabulary around oversized proportions, masculine cuts, monochrome layering, and intellectual elegance. Her clothes never looked styled; they looked inhabited. What made the “Diane Keaton look” so radical was precisely this refusal of glamour in its expected form. In the late 1970s, while Hollywood celebrated hyper-femininity, she appeared in oversized jackets, waistcoats, loose trousers, gloves, ties and wide-brimmed hats, borrowing from menswear without ever losing sensuality. The silhouette she created in Annie Hall became instantly iconic, not because it was fashionable, but because it felt deeply personal. Even today, traces of Keaton’s style can be found everywhere, from contemporary tailoring to the return of monochrome dressing and exaggerated proportions on the runway. Few actresses have influenced the way women dress as profoundly or as quietly.
But Diane Keaton’s legacy extends far beyond a single silhouette. Before Annie Hall, there was her unforgettable performance in The Godfather trilogy, where she played Kay Adams Corleone with a restrained intelligence that contrasted sharply with the operatic violence surrounding her. Then came Manhattan, Reds and later Something’s Gotta Give, films that each cemented a different facet of her public persona: neurotic wit, emotional independence, intellectual sensuality, mature elegance.
CITY’s personal favorites from the sale include the original untitled Annie Hall screenplay, estimated between $2,000 and $3,000, less for its market value than for what it represents culturally: the birth of an entirely new female silhouette in American cinema. Equally compelling is Keaton’s black bowler hat, estimated at $400–600, a deceptively simple object that became one of the most recognizable accessories of late-1970s Hollywood. Nearby, a Ralph Lauren polka-dot tie estimated at $100–200 quietly encapsulates the androgynous elegance she made iconic decades before fashion embraced gender-fluid dressing.
Another remarkable piece is the Gucci sequined ensemble and matching beret worn by Diane Keaton to the 2021 LACMA Art+Film Gala. Unlike the restrained monochrome tailoring usually associated with her, the look revealed another side of her style vocabulary: theatrical, playful, almost eccentric, yet still unmistakably Diane Keaton. Bonhams estimates the ensemble at $2,000–3,000.
Architecture as self-portrait
Beyond fashion, some of the most fascinating lots come from Keaton’s deeply personal relationship with interiors and architecture. One especially moving object is a simple step ladder from her Los Angeles home, displayed with stacks of books and personal items exactly as she arranged them herself. Estimated at $1,000–1,500, it feels less like furniture than a fragment of her creative process, like a glimpse into the obsessive visual editing that defined her homes.
Beyond cinema, Keaton quietly became one of Hollywood’s great preservationists and design obsessives. Over the years, she restored and reinvented several Los Angeles homes, publishing books dedicated to architecture, photography and interiors. Her fascination with California modernism, industrial spaces, monochrome palettes and raw materials shaped an aesthetic now endlessly referenced across fashion and interior design alike. Long before celebrity homes became lifestyle content, Diane Keaton had already turned domestic space into a creative language.
Another CITY favorite from the sale: the interiors and decorative objects from her Sullivan Canyon residence in Los Angeles. Diane Keaton’s passion for architecture and restoration has long been central to her identity, perhaps even more than fashion. The auction includes furniture, carefully selected domestic objects, and artworks that reflect her fascination with American modernism and understated California minimalism.
The art section is equally revealing. Train on the Desert Arizona by Maynard Dixon, estimated at $20,000–40,000, echoes Keaton’s lifelong fascination with the West, emptiness and solitude. Also noteworthy: David Wojnarowicz’s Buffalos, estimated at $25,000–35,000, a work whose raw political and emotional intensity sharply contrasts with the controlled minimalism of Keaton’s interiors, and perhaps reveals the tension beneath her famously composed image.
The sale also includes several of Diane Keaton’s own artworks and photographs: large-format portraits, photobooth strips from the 1970s to the 1990s, black-and-white Hollywood street photography, and mixed-media collages assembled with the same instinctive sense of framing visible throughout her homes and wardrobe. More intimate than the Hollywood memorabilia, these pieces may ultimately be the true heart of the auction.
Rather than simply celebrating Hollywood glamour, the auction reveals another side of Keaton: a woman obsessed with composition, solitude, archives, textures, and space. Someone whose universe was built less around spectacle than around sensibility.
New York Exhibition: May 29 – June 8, 2026
Live Auction: June 8, 2026 at Bonhams New York, on Madison Avenue
Online Sales: Running through June 2026 online via Bonhams Online Auctions.