It was early 2020, just before the pandemic hit. I was wandering through my favorite boutique in Park Slope (rest in peace, Bird—there was truly no place like you), absentmindedly touching the fabrics. My twins were still under a year old, and I was still recovering from the experience. My body, mind, and spirit had expanded, yes, but I also felt drained and exposed. I was slowly finding my way back to myself, searching for this new version of me among the racks of clothing.

Then I spotted it—an off-white maxi dress covered in bold black poppies, their petals splayed open with bursts of bright red berries. At the time, I didn’t realize they were opium poppies; I just knew the dress was untamed, effortless, and elegant. I checked the price tag, already certain I wouldn’t buy it, but letting myself daydream about a life where I could. The brand was Rodebjer, a Swedish label known for its polished yet bohemian aesthetic. I hung the dress back on the rack, leaving it for someone with a little more energy, a little more spontaneity.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I found it again online and traced it to Rodebjer’s Resort 2020 collection. There it was, alongside a faux-fur leopard-print coat, a scallop-hemmed dress that looked like freshly picked lettuce, and a sleek, sheer black lace gown. Many of the pieces had capes or winged sleeves, as if designed for flight. According to the brand’s website, the collection was inspired by the “free intellect and relaxed style of psychedelic pioneer Rosemary Woodruff Leary.”

I’d never heard of her. Most people hadn’t.

Rosemary Leary (bottom left) singing with her husband, Timothy Leary, during the recording of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Give Peace a Chance at their Montreal Bed-In for Peace, 1969.
Photo: Gerry Deiter. Copyright © 1969 by Joan E. Athey. Used with permission.

Rosemary was briefly married to Timothy Leary—the former Harvard professor turned LSD evangelist of the 1960s, famous for urging a generation to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” She stood by him at the height of his fame, and for a time, her name carried enough weight to headline events. Allen Ginsberg called her “the Acid Queen.” Friends and followers saw her as an authority on psychedelic “set and setting”—the art of crafting the ideal environment and mindset for a trip.

Over their seven-year relationship, Rosemary watched Timothy’s notoriety explode. She joined him at media appearances, speeches, and even during his failed campaign for California governor against Ronald Reagan. She went to jail for refusing to testify against him in a grand jury hearing, edited his speeches, sewed his clothes, and even helped plan his infamous 1970 prison escape after he was sentenced to 30 years for marijuana possession. She called herself his “computer”—she kept his secrets, made his meals. After the escape, they went underground. And that’s where her story seemed to vanish. From then on, Rosemary disappeared from history.

But Rodebjer’s founder, Carin Rodebjer, had stumbled upon photos of Rosemary while researching an acid commune in Millbrook, New York. Those images convinced her that Rosemary belonged among her other muses, like Gloria Steinem and Joan Didion. “She wasn’t a typical hippie,” Rodebjer later told me. “She had a kind of strictness to her that I loved. A disciplined hippie. And at the time, no one in Sweden even knew who she was.” She was, as writer Maya Singer once described, “a woman with her feet on the ground and her head in the sky.”

I saw something similar in her.

I’ve always been drawn to altered states, to the pursuit of transcendence. My own experience with autoimmune encephalitis—a disease that warped my reality, plunging me into psychosis and delusions—left me obsessed with the mind’s possibilities and limits. Now, I wanted to understand what drove people like Rosemary toward liberation and self-erasure. Could someone truly chase groundlessness—My search led me to the Rosemary Woodruff Leary collection at the New York Public Library, where I discovered photos tracing her extraordinary life—from her childhood in St. Louis and brief teenage marriage to her modeling career in New York, her years with Timothy Leary, her fugitive period across Europe and Central America, and finally her quiet quarter-century under an assumed name on Cape Cod—the untold chapter of her story. She had helped shape Leary’s transformation from Harvard academic to counterculture icon, a shift where clothing played a key role, while reinventing herself in the process.

Timothy and Rosemary Leary’s 1970 passport photos in Algeria reveal a couple in flux. Rosemary was no stereotypical hippie—no garish tie-dye (or if present, it was artfully done). Her style shifted with her life’s tides. Arriving in New York in 1958, she sported a sharp bob, short hemlines, and thick black dancer’s stockings. Immersed in the counterculture, she adopted low-slung bell-bottoms and knotted men’s shirts. At Millbrook, she sewed her own dresses from communal fabric—simple yet elegant. Campaigning for Leary’s prison release, she wore a stark black mini dress, oversized pink-lensed sunglasses, and a bold LSD-inscribed amulet.

She crafted Leary’s image too, sewing his clothes, ditching his professor tweeds for unbuttoned linen and floral adornments—turning a man into a myth.

For her, clothing was both armor and rebellion, survival and disguise. When she engineered Leary’s prison escape, she transformed into a 1950s cliché—blonde bouffant, heavy makeup, push-up bra—mocking the conformity she’d once fled. In exile, she reinvented herself country by country: a blue-caped figure in Afghanistan, a green-gowned goddess in Colombia, wrapped in fur-trimmed coats in the Swiss Alps. By Cape Cod, her wardrobe softened into chunky knits and Eileen Fisher linen, though flashes of her past remained—like the striking purple coat that turned heads in Provincetown.

Her clothes amplified, concealed, and shielded her across time and space. They held magic. A poet friend once said shopping with her was like “hunting for the magic object.”

Inspired to live a little more like Rosemary, I finally bought something from Rodebjer—not the poppy dress I’d coveted (still no room for that in my life), but a flowing black-and-white silk caftan printed with peace signs, third eyes, and yin-yangs that looked like breasts, billed as an “idea travel-wardrobe staple.”

Now and then, I wear it at the beach with my three kids. Watching them play in the waves, I realize the part of me I thought was lost was merely hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

Susannah Cahalan is the author of the forthcoming The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary.