David Hockney was “a proper dandy,” as his friend, Christopher Simon Sykes, once remarked—and the picture of a very English kind of elegance. The revolutionary British artist has passed away aged 88.
Hockney first appeared in the pages of Vogue in 1963 not long after his first solo show. In a group portrait alongside painters Howard Hodgkin, John Howlin, and Ian Stephenson, this magazine described them as “The Impact Makers.” While the others are dressed in more somber and sleek black suits, an icy-haired Hockney sports pale blue and fuchsia-pink.
For the August 2020 cover of British Vogue, the Bradford-born artist created a bucolic painting of a wheat field near Fridaythorpe, a sleepy village in East Yorkshire. In the decades between both appearances, we hailed him a formidable “style icon.” Having dyed his hair to create what became a signature shock of yellow in the late ’60s, after he watched a Clairol advert proclaiming that “blonds have more fun,” Hockney built a look around wide-rimmed, round glasses, a slightly rumpled demeanor, and an explosion of mismatched bright colors.
His impact on fashion and style at large is boundless, too. A muse for the British house Burberry, former creative director Christopher Bailey sent out a primary color-popping, foppish, and fresh spring 2014 collection inspired by the artist. “I once saw David Hockney on Jermyn Street, wearing a cream linen suit with a perfect green paint smudge on it,” Bailey told the Guardian at the time. “I love the way Hockney wears color, so that you’re never completely sure how deliberately the look is put together.” Harry Styles is one of many fan-boys—for his Vogue cover shoot in 2020, Styles wore a pair of hand-painted Bode cords that featured a talismanic illustration of Hockney by artist Aayushia Khowala. It’s hard to imagine Styles’s vibrant, textured style journey without Hockney as an arterial reference.
“David Hockney has been reinventing the way we look at the world for decades,” Styles said at the time, when Hockney painted him for the National Portrait Gallery’s Hockney exhibition “Drawing From Life” in 2020. “It was a complete privilege to be painted by him.”
Hockney’s eye for color, of course, was unmatched. As he put to Vogue in 2006: “You have to look, of course, to see the color, and most people don’t look.” Here, Vogue looks back at a life in style. Rest in peace David Hockney—a fabulous tastemaker then, now, and beyond.
