What Artists Wear by Charlie Porter

What Artists Wear by Charlie Porter

 

*A Financial Times Book of the Year*

 

'The first time I opened What Artists Wear, I gasped with pleasure. Imagine it as a kind of punk cousin to John Berger's Ways of Seeing, liberally illustrated with the most astonishing images of artists, decked out in finery or rags ... It transported me to somewhere glamorous, exciting, even revolutionary' Olivia Laing, Guardian

 

Most of us live our lives in our clothes without realizing their power. But in the hands of artists, garments reveal themselves. They are pure tools of expression, storytelling, resistance and creativity: canvases on which to show who we really are.

 

In What Artists Wear, style luminary Charlie Porter takes us on an invigorating, eye-opening journey through the iconic outfits worn by artists, in the studio, on stage, at work, at home and at play. From Yves Klein's spotless tailoring to the kaleidoscopic costumes of Yayoi Kusama and Cindy Sherman; from Andy Warhol's signature denim to Charlotte Prodger's casualwear, Porter's roving eye picks out the magical, revealing details in the clothes he encounters, weaving together a new way of understanding artists, and of dressing ourselves.

 

Part love letter, part guide to chic, and featuring generous photographic spreads, What Artists Wear is both a manual and a manifesto, a radical, gleeful, inspiration to see the world anew-and find greater pleasure and possibility in the clothes we all wear.

The art of getting dressed

 

Charlie Porter shot at his home

 

Rachel Cooke

Rachel Cooke

@msrachelcooke

Sun 16 May 2021 12.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2021/may/16/the-art-of-getting-dressed-charlie-porter

 

The fashion writer Charlie Porter has always been a compulsive reader of the language of clothes, his eye drawn irresistibly to the colour of a stranger’s coat; to the cut of their suit or the logo on their trainers. “I think everyone’s a bit like that,” he says. “We all do it, all the time. Clothes are information. A policeman’s uniform tells you what he does. If you feel threatened or out of place, it’s often clothing that gives you this sense first. But because I’ve worked in fashion, I suppose I’m particularly attuned to it.” Is the sartorial ticker tape in his head a bit exhausting sometimes? “Not exactly.” He laughs. “But the pandemic has given me quite a nice rest from it.”

 

I meet Porter, the author of an eclectic but invigorating new book about artists’ clothes, in the public garden at Arnold Circus, near his home in Shoreditch, east London – and, naturally, my first question has to do with his own look. Never mind his painters and sculptors. What is he wearing today? Porter regards himself as “quite a mess, usually,” but yes, he admits to having put some thought into his look this morning. “This is by Craig Green, a young London designer,” he says, of a heavy cotton jacket in Yves Klein blue that’s decorated with mirror work. Opening it, he reveals an off-white artist’s smock from Labour and Wait, hipster purveyor of all that is functional, from aprons to watering cans, which he favours for the freedom of movement it permits as well as for its “space-age” collar. This is matched to a pair of striped trousers whose provenance he can’t quite remember. Finally, there are his loafers, which are Gucci and about 15 years old.

 

Porter, who is 47, has always loved fashion. As a teenager, he would travel to London from his home in rural Northamptonshire, and rifle the bargain bin at Sign of the Times, the cult club-wear shop in Kensington. “I had this T-shirt by Big Jesus Trash Can that had angels in gas masks on it – I used to wear it all the time.”

 

But his new book was born (initially, at least) of frustration with fashion as much as of fondness for it. “Fashion writing is often seen as fluff – and sometimes it is. But I always felt it was a way of writing about other things, too: the economy, psychology, society, communication, desire.” In fashion journalism, the industry sets artificial limits; those who report on it are, by necessity, obsessed with trends. But most people’s wardrobes have more to do with their emotional life than with some neverending quest for novelty. “Some clothes are utilitarian,” says Porter. “Some are sentimental. Some have to do with the community to which a person belongs, or wants to belong. Hopefully, my book speaks to these things. It’s not interested in best-dressed lists, or in so-called icons, even though many of the artists in it are famous.”

 

Why choose artists, though? Is this because he believes their aesthetic sensibilities are more finely tuned than our own? “No, it’s more that artists are better able in their lives to have a deeper understanding of clothing. Most people have to dress a certain way – or we feel that we do. In our working hours, we’re not in real communication with our clothing. We might even feel negatively about them: we might hate our jobs, we might feel constricted. Artists are a good case study because, alone in the studio, they’re freed of those outside forces.” The characters in his book – it is populated by the likes of Frida Kahlo and Andy Warhol, as well as by less well-known names – are, he believes, liberated in a way that we’d all like to be, if only we had the opportunity (or the courage). “Fashion is cruel to those who are older,” he says. “Which is mad because the population is ageing and older people don’t just stop being engaged in clothing or interested in what it can do for the body. But in my book, you’ve got Louise Bourgeois, who doesn’t meet Helmut Lang [with whom she becomes great friends, and whose clothes she wears] until she is in her 80s.”

 

Bourgeois stands a little apart from some of his other subjects for the reason that she loved fancy, expensive clothes. “The Easton Foundation has preserved her house in New York exactly as it was in her time,” says Porter. “It’s extraordinary. There are these two rails of clothes, one in the basement – it’s the kind of thing your dad would put up for you – and the other next to her galley kitchen, with its two-ring cooker and its greasy walls. The second rail is a fabulous thing, because it shows how much a part of her life her clothes were. They were there to be worn – even the tufted monkey fur coat she wore in the 1982 photograph of her by Robert Mapplethorpe, which shrank in the wash.”

 

On this rail, Porter found, somewhat to his excitement, a tuxedo coat by Lang that had been made for the model Stephanie Seymour to wear in his spring/summer 1999 show, in Paris. But whether flashy or not, for Bourgeois clothes were also repositories of memory. “She wrote again and again that she couldn’t bear to part with them,” says Porter. “In the end, she started using them in her work. A van took them all to her studio – an extreme action for her, the cutting of a chord – and this marked the beginning of an incredibly creative period in her career.”

 

Some artists use clothes like a uniform, the better to free their minds to think about other things – and, perhaps, to make themselves instantly recognisable. “That’s definitely the case with Joseph Beuys,” says Porter [the German artist, famed for his happenings and installations, spent the last 25 years of his life in the same thing: a felt hat, a fisherman’s jacket, a white shirt and blue jeans]. “But with Gilbert and George, who always wear heavy tweed suits, it’s more to do with enclosure and regimentation. It makes for a contrast to their work, a contradiction that delights them.”

The young David Hockney, on the other hand, used his look – the opposite of a uniform, even his tank tops and ties gave him the air of a charming, overgrown schoolboy – to signal his sexuality. “In fashion, he is so often mentioned as a style icon,” says Porter. “But that’s not why he wore the clothes he did [arriving in London from Bradford as a student in 1959, Hockney favoured bright colours; he also dyed his black hair blond]. He belonged to this new wave of postwar working-class people who could peg out their own territory. Queerness in the 20th century had always been very upper class – a bit foppish – because only people with a certain income could afford to live above the law. But Hockney was from an activist family, and his father was also a man who used to stick polka dots on his bow tie. Hockney’s clothes were his way of saying: ‘I’m gay.’”

 

For a moment, Porter looks at my long, striped wool scarf, which is also brightly coloured. “The other thing is that people give themselves pleasure and comfort by putting colour in their field of vision.”

 

But it’s the chapters of his book devoted to female artists that make for the most fascinating reading, their clothes liberating them by giving them permission to be different in a world where everyone else is in twinsets and pearls: the painter Agnes Martin, in her spattered overalls and quilted jackets; the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, in her boiler suits. “Hepworth chose clothes that would enable her to work outside in the cold and protect her from the stuff that was flying around as she made her sculptures,” says Porter. “But it was self-conscious, too. She always looked fantastic.”

 

In 1944, at 41, Hepworth wrote to her friend, Margaret Gardiner, of her desire to find clothes better suited to how she felt on the inside. “The average older woman’s clothes are appalling,” she noted. “We have to evolve some personal style that is an inspiration to ourselves… evolving the personality in clothes is very important and so difficult now.” Porter relishes this letter, not only for the way it sets out how she’ll dress in the next decades (elasticated waists, zipped jackets, slacks, flat shoes), but also for the small signs of embarrassment (“this all sounds a bit silly”) she reveals at taking an interest in such things. “We still find it difficult to talk about clothing in an honest way. We fear doing so is trivial, superficial.”

 

Other female artists in the book use clothes as part of their practice. Porter writes of Sarah Lucas, and the work she has made from worn-in Doc Martens and old tights; of Anthea Hamilton, whose performance piece The Squash, staged at Tate Britain, involved a faceless character in a squash-shaped helmet made in collaboration with fashion house Loewe, and 14 different costumes.

 

“Clothes are very important in my work,” the artist Cindy Sherman tells him (disguised in wigs, heavy makeup and costumes she finds in thrift stores, she takes on multiple personas in her outsize photographs). “They play a major factor in giving clues to a character’s personality.”

 

Most fascinating of all is Lynn Hershman Leeson, a performance artist who in 1973 transformed herself into an artwork called Roberta Breitmore, a woman whose life she would live for the next five years. Roberta wore the same clothes every day: a patterned dress and a brown and cream cardigan bought in a sale for $5.99 (the tag remained on the clothes, visible to everyone she met). The piece was about the “trap” of the female experience 1970s America – though ironically her alter ego gave Leeson herself a new and thrilling freedom (“I had a lot of clothes,” she tells Porter in his book. “Too many clothes.”)

Porter, whose parents are both artists, read philosophy at King’s College London. He did work experience at Vogue. Then worked at the Guardian, GQ and the FT, where he was menswear critic until 2018. But he thinks he’s probably done with that world now (having finished a novel, he hopes to write another book about fashion). “I’d said everything I wanted to say. Flares! They were so exciting the first time around. Then you come to realise flares often follow a couple of seasons where there have been tighter jeans. You learn all the tricks of it.” There is, he feels, too little space – commercially, and on the page – for young designers now; too much emphasis on celebrity. But this isn’t to say he feels any less strongly about fashion’s importance. “If someone talks about an era, often the first thing they mention is clothing. It’s a way in. It always will be.”

 

When he was at college, fashion was exciting: designers such as Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan were breaking through, and those who wrote about them had, he insists, a certain “intellectual rigour”. Porter mourns those days now, and worries, too, about where the internet will take fashion. But he believes things are also changing. People are thinking more about where their clothes come from and where they’ll go when they die. For his part, he is determined to wear as many of his old clothes as he can, for as long as he can (hence the ancient Gucci loafers).

 

The chief beneficiary of his years on the front row is the V&A, to whose costume department he has so far donated 82 items. “If you’re lucky enough to work in fashion, I think it’s important not to be involved in avarice or covetousness,” he says. “The V&A had almost no contemporary menswear when I went to see its storage facilities – just a few bespoke shirts. So I got in touch, and asked if they would be interested in some of the things I’d collected down the years.” He smiles. “Yeah, I’ve a got a cabinet in the galleries there now,” he says. If his voice is wry, it’s also tinged, ever so slightly, with pride.