I am not an artist, but I own five artist smocks. A couple are vintage, two were newly bought from London’s Labour and Wait, in black and ecru, and another is technically a fisherman’s smock, from Saint James Atelier.
I’ve been wearing these smocks for years, in the same way I wear sweatshirts and sweaters. I obviously want to dress like an artist. But, writing my upcoming book What Artists Wear, it was clear there was something more to their clothes than just overt style. From Barbara Hepworth and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Sarah Lucas and Martine Syms, many have forged an approach to clothes from which we could learn. It wasn’t just what they were wearing, it was how, and why.
Clothing can inspire
A letter from the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth was revelatory. Written to a friend in 1944, it says: “We have to evolve some personal style that is an inspiration to ourselves.” She said she was interested in “the outward expression of social events as seen in clothing”, that it was “natural to think about it” and “to want new clothes”. For Hepworth, the functional clothes she wore weren’t just about impeccable style. They carried within them the optimism and idealism that she channelled into her postwar sculptures.
Hepworth wore smocks to carve her modernist, primal forms, and a hair-net to keep out the flying dust and debris. On site visits to prepare her monumental public sculptures, like the work Single Form that still stands outside the United Nations in New York, she favoured zip-up jackets with elastic waists. These clothes gave her style, yet allowed her to function. In turn, this functionality inspired her work. It sounds so simple, yet so often we find our own wardrobe choices pulled by other forces: work dress codes, fashion trends, clothes we wear to impress others.
Dress for the world you want
Artists also use clothing to shape their creative worlds. For Basquiat, it was the expressive freedom, the vivacity of colour and the disregard for formality that went from his clothes to his canvases (or doors, walls, refrigerators and whatever else he painted on). For Francis Bacon, being photographed wearing fairly fresh clothing — like the shirt and sweater he wore for a portrait by Cecil Beaton — was his way to exert control over the chaos and filth of his studio (when the door closed, he changed back to his mucky old Marks & Spencer dressing gowns).
Build a personal brand
Art can now be a lived experience, with artists putting themselves, and their clothing, at the centre of their work. Often, the result is that the clothes become almost stand-ins for the artists themselves. Joseph Beuys was an early outlier for this, with his own famous look: a felt hat, fisherman’s vest, cotton shirt, Levi’s jeans. He wore a variation on this ensemble every day, clothing so practical he didn’t have to think about it. And yet Beuys knew what he was doing, creating an identity that soon became globally recognised. For Beuys, the hat in particular had shamanistic powers. “The hat,” he said, “functions like another personality.”
Enjoy your clothes
Many artists are exhilarated by the sheer joy of dressing. Every evening, the American artist Jack Whitten would spray-paint his sneakers silver, so that, according to his daughter Mirsini Amidon, they were always “fresh and shiny”. In Los Angeles, the multimedia artist Martine Syms, whose works encompasses film, installation, performance and publications, enjoys taking time in the daily act of dressing: “I like to be, what’s my look today… are we going more femme or more masc, what shoe?” she told me of her free-wheeling style, favouring independent brands such as Martine Rose, Simone Rocha, Aries and Boot Boyz Biz. The curiosity and playfulness she puts into her wardrobe is reflected in the questioning energy of her art.
Clothes are cultural
Artists’ clothing can be used to trace the history of garments themselves. Andy Warhol is a key example, part of the American generation that took denim jeans from a garment of function to one of fashion. This shift correlates with Warhol’s work, taking mass branding, such as Campbell’s soup tins, and turning it into pop art that served as cultural critique. Or the language of power in tailoring, wielded by artists such as Yves Klein, who wore a tuxedo while directing naked females to use their bodies as paintbrushes for his 1960 work Anthropometries, and subverted by Frida Kahlo in her 1940 painting Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair.
Back to Hepworth. In that same letter, she showed embarrassment at considering style at all. “You will have to put down all this nonsense to my general feverishness & excuse it,” she wrote. Whenever we talk with honesty and insight about our clothing, we tend to do so with a side of self-mocking, as if we are silly to even consider this language of clothing as anything important. And yet this language of clothes is affecting, from Louise Bourgeois’ Cell sculptures that used her old garments, to Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits, where much of the image’s narrative comes from the clothing.
Maybe it’s not about trying to copy an artist’s style garment by garment at all. What matters is attitude and maybe we can use the example of artists to face up to our clothing, just as their work asks us to face up to our emotions, our politics and our understanding of the world.
When Kahlo wore a tailored suit in Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, she was holding the messaging of clothing to account. When 2019 Turner Prize winner Helen Cammock performs in her everyday sweatshirts and trackpants, she makes a declarative point about who gets invited into institutions, and how much further implicit dress codes can break down. To me, it is a thrilling prospect, to face up to societal forces. That way, we could no longer feel that we “follow” fashion, but play an active, creative role within it.
‘What Artists Wear’ by Charlie Porter is available on May 27
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