To cope with the death of her husband and son, Helen Van Winkle began dressing more adventurously: “You don’t know what’s going to happen to you. I blamed God forever. I cried all the time because I couldn’t come to terms with it, so I made myself over into Baddie Winkle.”

According to Winkle, the origin story goes like this: “One day, I was laying out in the sun, and I put on some tie-dyed shirt and a pair of cutoff shorts of my [great-]granddaughter Kennedy’s. She came home and said, ‘Oh, Granny, you look so cute! Let me take a pic of you.” Ever since the first Instagram post, Winkle’s outfits and antics have turned her into a sartorial celebrity, and she and Kennedy have been sent a ton of clothing and merchandise to play around in. “We wear some of them, and some of them we don’t, because we don’t like them,” Winkle says. “Most of the time, Kennedy picks what they send over. She’s my stylist, too — she helps me out a lot. Of course, she wants me to do things I don’t want to do, too, but that’s neither here nor there.”