It always seemed as if there were another David Hockney outfit to discover.
There were the core ones, the ones that pinged around the mood boards of the fashion world for decades. They’d show the painter at every life stage: the young Londoner in his pink-striped rugby shirt and pulverized plimsolls, or the still whimsical pop-art icon in mod tweed suits well into his 80s.
Hockney, who died on Thursday at 88, had a madcap maximalism in his approach to style. As with his paintings, he favored bold colors for his clothes. When he met King Charles a few years ago, the royal declared, “Your yellow galoshes! Beautifully chosen!” (Hockney was wearing Big Bird-colored Crocs). I think of Hockey in his late 30s wearing a pistachio-colored sport coat and an unruly bouffant bow tie. Or Hockney in 2004, assessing one of his own paintings in an open field in East Yorkshire, in a beige blazer so worn that threads poured off it like shedding hair.
He was the art world’s jocular jester in mismatched shoes and sport coats fit for Disney cartoons. His clothes didn’t whisper, they roared with mirth and excess. They sent you running to your own closet to wonder why you couldn’t dress like that.
Hockney was so often cited as a “style icon” that he became a north star for designers trying to get men to wear more color.
“It usually happens when there’s been a season where suddenly there’s color in men’s wear that people fall back on Hockney as an attempt to convince men to wear two colors in the same outfit,” said Charlie Porter, the author of “What Artists Wear.”
“He wasn’t engaged in fashion in terms of changing silhouettes,” said Porter, who in a past life was a fashion-show reviewer. But what Hockney could do was to make the absurd appear natural on him. Accessories that would have been clownish on others — the foppish bow tie or a pocket square that appeared to be puking out of his chest pocket — just looked organic on him.
When it comes to style, some people just have it. It seems to emanate from their very being. Hockney was that kind of man.
“I don’t ever look at pictures of him and just think, ‘Oh, not so good,’” said Simon Chilvers, a writer in London who has written frequently about Hockney’s outfits over the years.
There were constants to his look: his stamp of flaxen hair, chunky spectacles and impish expressions. But what was so inspiring about the artist’s fashion sense was that he never gave up. His style, much like his working process (recall those polarizing iPad paintings) continued to shape-shift as he aged.
In his 20s, he leaned toward knit ties and V-neck sweaters, perhaps still under the spell of schoolboy standards. In images of Hockney as a student at the Royal College of Art in London, one could already detect a preternatural sense of self lurking behind those glasses. As some have noted, this confidence may have stemmed from Hockney’s sexuality. He came out of the closet early (his father’s advice to him and his four siblings was “Never worry what the neighbors think”) and never seemed to feel any need to suppress who he was.
“It’s all out there, there’s no hiding and I think that’s allowed his wardrobe to be what he wants it to be,” Chilvers said. “There was a freedom in the way in which he expressed himself.”
But much as his canvases grew more unruly as he matured, and as he moved from Britain to Los Angeles and back again, so too did his style evolve. In came the primary-color cardigans, the lime-green shirts and the gingham driving caps.
“I hate what men wear today,” Hockney said in 2023. “It’s just sports clothes. Where’s all the style?” That year, he said he bought nine new suits.
“There’s always this feeling with Hockney that he never felt trapped, he just enjoyed it,” said Michael Hill, the owner of Drake’s, a men’s apparel brand in London. “He was intelligent enough to have seen what might be traditional and classic, but he subverted it all in his way.”
A few years before the artist died, Hill heard that Hockney had received a color-blocked Drake’s cardigan as a gift. A photo of the artist wearing the technicolored knit made its way back to Hill.
“That’s a photograph that I was extremely keen to show my mother,” he said.
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