How appropriate that the late David Hockney favoured that ash blonde hair colour, given that the chain-smoker was said to get through 100 cigarettes a day? And not just any old fags: the long, slender and upmarket Davidoff Magnum Classic, of which he was said to keep a store of 2,000 at home for emergencies. Hockney said they helped him concentrate. But this everyday accessory was also a yellowed two-fingers to anyone who wanted to close down what he saw as his right to live as he chose. More than that – and let’s hope no school kids are reading – they imbued him with an old Hollywood, rebel cool, especially in more anti-tab times. ‘You can’t have a smoke-free Bohemia,’ as he once noted.
While Hockney, who died at the age of 88 last week, will rightly be remembered for his art, his art of style should also not be forgotten. Take that hair colour: he went bottle blonde in the 1960s after seeing a Clairol commercial on TV in New York intoning that ‘everybody should go blonde’. It’s probable the ad was not aimed at any man from Bradford – or any man of that era – but Hockney made his luminous do, often worn in Boris Johnson’s wind-tunnel look, one of his many visual trademarks. It would be outgunned only later in life, after he’d greyed, by those full-rimmed spectacles, akin to Mr Toad’s driving goggles, invariably seen under a baseball cap or a flat cap. Well, he was a Yorkshireman.
Hockney was a master of controlled deshabille. The crumpled and outsized dress that so-often characterises old men as they shrink within their clothing was something Hockney was pulling off in his 30s. A master of layers – shirt, knitted waistcoat, soft tailored jacket, sometimes a cardigan over a sweater – invariably looked fresh from the washing machine. He often wore a knitted tie, but always loose and skew-whiff, his shirt collar doing its own thing entirely. If he wore white pumps with his suit – and he did this decades before wearing casual footwear with formalwear became fashionable – they’d be a little battered.
Certainly Hockney said he never cared for the idea of fitting in. But while this sartorial not giving a toss – as the Yorkshireman might have put it – might be dismissed as silly by his buttoned-up, fellow Brits, it passed for what the Italians would call sprezzatura: a nonchalance that concealed an artfulness behind it. You can be sure that when Hockney attended the opening of his Bigger & Closer exhibition in 2023, in a brown and red checked suit, with a black and white checked scarf, flat cap and – yes – a pair of yellow Crocs, that was quite deliberate. He even wore them to meet the King, that other unsung style hero, albeit of another stripe. ‘Beautifully chosen,’ Charles noted.
Naturally enough for an artist known for his bold use of verdant greens, rich reds and, above all, those azure swimming pool blues, Hockney was a supreme colourist in clothing too: a mint-green cardigan over a cornflower blue shirt and red tie; wide khaki trousers (he loved a bit of preppy) with a white shirt, red and white spotted bow-tie and a leaf green blazer. Socks were boldly-hued and often odd, as though not to miss the opportunity of squeezing in one more shade.
While this sartorial not giving a toss – as the Yorkshireman might have put it – might be dismissed as silly by his buttoned-up, fellow Brits, it passed for what the Italians would call sprezzatura
Then there were the mismatched, clashing patterns: pinstripe worn with tattersall, polka dot with herringbone, stripes worn with checks, stripes worn with yet more stripes, of a different width or colour. Just look at the cover of the monograph David Hockney by David Hockney – first published 50 years ago – and his outfit is of the kind you might find in a child’s dressing up box: a huge-knotted striped tie worn with a rugby shirt. Frankly, nothing Hockney wore went together. And yet, on him everything did.
It would be tempting to dismiss all this self-styling as the licence afforded to celebrities to dress as they please – or, truth be told, as their stylists or their brand sponsorship deals please – with wacky as their watchword. That is, in ways often inexplicably judged to be stylish but certainly beyond the realms of what mere normies can get away with without a little ribbing.
But Hockney was pulling off these feats of flair when still a student, at a time when stylist was a profession yet to be imagined by some dapper careers officer. His style wasn’t reducible to a gimmick – Frida Kahlo’s traditional Mexican shawl, Salvador Dali’s waxed moustache, Andy Warhol’s silvery wig. It was total and – just as remarkably – lifelong.
If any of us are tempted to think that pursuing even a soupçon of panache is a young person’s game, Hockney showed the error of our thinking. No wonder he would often lament the decline of dress standards – and by that he meant for their quality of expression, not of meeting societal expectations. ‘I hate what men wear today,’ he noted in 2023 when he was already 85. ‘It’s just sports clothes. Where’s the style?’ Where indeed?
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