English Painter David Hockney / Photo by mikel roberts
David Hockney: 40 Images That Prove He Was Always a Tastemaker
BY ANNA CAFOLLA AND ELLIE PITHERSHockney 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.
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1965
Printmaking at the Edition Alecto Press studios in London, in signature stripes.
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1966
Wearing a perkily-angled hat and a crisp suit, as well as his trademark Le Corbusier glasses, Hockney smiled for a portrait on the set of Ubu Roi at the Royal Court Theatre in London. It was his first foray into set design, having been inspired by the instructions of the absurdist playwright Alfred Jarry, who forbade traditional scenery.
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November 1967
Having won the first prize in the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition, the young painter waved his cheque and posed with his painting Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool, wearing a polka dotted silk tie.
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1967
A young Hockney paints in his studio wearing a Coney Island sweater.
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1971
Worn with casual irony by the working-class artist, Hockney embraced the rugby shirt in all its garish glory, frequently pairing it with khakis and plimsolls.
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November, 1971
Hockney in his studio, in a cable-knit sweater.
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1970s
Photographed in a favorite rugby shirt and turned up cap in his studio in London.
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1970s
Hockney in his studio completing a typically colorful sketch, in a typically smart shirt-and-tie combo.
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May 1972
Wearing a natty suit and energizing tie at a party held in his honor in New York.
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1972
Partying after the London production of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera—Hockney designed the poster for the production. Those Le Corbusier glasses came off for nobody.
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1972
Another day, another perfect party look. This time, in the New York City loft apartment of art dealer Michael Findlay, he returns to his favorite color combo: primary blue and scarlet.
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1978
Hockney in a signature crumpled trench coat and bow tie in the Hollywood Hills.
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1980
Hockney in a typically thrown-together outfit and mismatched trainers.
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1981
An immaculate Hockney in a gently oversized suit contrasts beautifully with a rainy Parisian street.
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1983
Candy stripes and gold-rimmed spectacles played to Hockney’s dandy image.
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1985
Resplendent in stripes, Hockney held a copy of the December 1985 issue of Vogue Paris, which featured one of his works: a Cubist-inspired portrait of his great friend Celia Birtwell. The cover was accompanied by a 41-page essay about the disruption of conventional notions of perspective in Western art.
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1986
Hockney attends his own exhibition preview at the Emmerich Gallery in New York, in pristine white slacks and a pale pink shirt.
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1987
The artist in his studio in Los Angeles, posing in a sky-blue sweatshirt.
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1988
Photographed in summer slacks, a bow tie and a quizzical expression.
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January, 1988
Pictured in France, wearing a classic ensemble of trench coat, tweeds, and a jaunty scarf.
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1988
Hockney in Paris, in a cosy argyle knit, stripes, spotty tie, and capacious trench coat.
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September 1990
In a summer suit at the California premiere of Pacific Heights.
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1990
Pictured in a trademark bright cardigan, with a panama and tie.
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April 1991
Posing in the living room of his Hollywood Hills home, Hockney showed off another pair of round-rimmed glasses.
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1991
The artist mixed his trusted wardrobe staples—stripes, louche suiting, a cardigan, and a pocket square—to elegant effect when photographed in the Théatre du Châtelet in Paris, with sets he designed for the plays Parade, by Erik Satie, and Les Mamelles de Tirésias, by Francis Poulenc.
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August 1991
In baby-pink crumpled linen for Herb Ritts’s birthday party at a converted warehouse in Culver City, California.
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January, 1994
Pictured in signature checks on Malibu Beach, outside his beach home.
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1995
Clutching his beloved dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie. (Incidentally, the breed of dog was popular with other artists, including Picasso and Andy Warhol.)
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1995
Attending the Pace Wildenstein Gallery in Beverly Hills, California, Hockney’s color combos felt fresh and offbeat: a perfect collaboration of sorbet yellow, azure blue, and tomato red.
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April 1995
Cherry red and bleached blue was the color pairing he chose for a portrait shoot in London.
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1997
A lesson in both color and texture theory, at the opening of his retrospective at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, 1997.
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1999
In a funky blue cap, Hockney played the joker with glasses covered with paint squiggles, clutching one of his beloved dachshunds.
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2017
Looking every inch the harbinger of spring himself, the painter posed with his vast work The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011, which he was donating to the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
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2017
Attending a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Hockney wore jaunty stripes and a flat cap.
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September 2018
Photographed with the Queen’s Window, a stained glass window Hockney designed, at Westminster Abbey.
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February 2019
Wearing an acid-green cardigan, Hockney laughed with a Dutch fireman after being freed from an elevator at an Amsterdam hotel. He had given a speech at a press conference concerning an exhibition of his work at the Van Gogh Museum, and was subsequently trapped for almost half an hour.
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2000
At the University of Leeds, where he and theatrical luminary Jude Kelly received an honorary degree—he matched his jaunty college robes to a suave pair of ruby red slippers.
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September 2005
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