In September 2007, about a week into my freshman year of college, I received a magazine in the mail that changed my brain chemistry in that way that’s only possible when you’re not yet 17 and enough of a sensitive knucklehead to consider 500 Days of Summer the height of cinematic achievement. (For the record: I still do.) It was GQ’s 50th anniversary issue, about as beefy as a phone book and built around a landmark list of the 50 most stylish men of the past 50 years. (There were 10 different cover stars; I lucked out and received the best one: Michael Jordan.)
I still think about the style advice doled out in that print package all the time—like the decree to buy your leather jackets “a size smaller than you normally would” to mimic the Ramones—but there was one page in particular that I remember stopping me in my tracks. It was the entry for David Hockney, the transformative British painter who died on Thursday at age 88. The photograph they’d chosen of him stuck out next to all these crisp, already-iconic portraits of Samuel Beckett and Malcolm X and Cary Grant. The Hockney image was blurry and out of focus, like a Polaroid taken by a toddler, and the artist, photographed in his early 30s, was sloped in a chair in his studio at an odd angle, with both his legs and arms awkwardly crossed. What caught my attention most of all, however, was the painter’s striped rugby shirt.
David Hockney and his rugby shirt in his studio, 1971.Avalon/Getty Images
I was on my high school’s rugby team just a few months prior, and mainly associated the rough-and-tumble jerseys with muddy, grueling practices and the Hollister-wearing bros I tried to steer clear of at keggers on the weekend. By contrast, Hockney wore his rugby in a way I’d never seen before: slim, artfully disheveled, and with the collar scrunched up just so, the natty pink-and-navy hoops playing brilliantly off his faded green fatigues, choppy bleach-blond hair, dirty laceless sneakers, and thick oddball frames. The painter had effortlessly turned this avatar of boarding-school jockiness into something that felt radical, punk rock, and ineffably cool. And sure, maybe “there’s more than one way to wear a piece of clothing” might seem like a pretty obvious takeaway, but allowing for the fact that I was 16, this was perhaps the most mind-boggling fashion revelation I’d ever had.
Immediately, I wanted to know more about this person. The accompanying blurb in the magazine described Hockney as a quintessential eccentric whose “primitive craving for brightness” often led him to wearing mismatched socks. A subsequent Google deep dive led me to realise that I loved his similarly colour-drenched paintings (in the wake of his passing, I’ll leave those tributes to more qualified experts) but was downright obsessed with the kooky palettes he cooked up in his wardrobe, coupling sunny yellow trousers with pea-green sport coats or roomy mauve suits with crimson needlepoint belts and royal-blue knit ties. Hockney’s ensembles were an extension of his brilliant work, and a calling card in their own right. His knack for colour alchemy seems to have launched a thousand other weirdo-prep ships: pop-cultural menswear renegades like Tyler, the Creator, Harry Styles, and Wes Anderson, and fashion-world darlings like Celine’s Michael Rider and Louis Vuitton’s Pharrell Williams, owe the artist a debt of gratitude.
