The Joy Of Wearing A Great Suit
At my primary school, we didn’t have to wear a uniform. I lived a five-minute walk away and went mostly wearing a rendition of my pyjamas or, as the youngest of four, an exuberant array of hand-me-downs. Growing up, one of my favourite books was Madeline, so I yearned to have that perfect Parisian-style uniform: a white club-collared shirt, petrol-blue dress, matching overcoat and large red ribbon. But at a school that celebrated Glastonbury as a holiday – and held a funeral for David Bowie when he died – it was more dinosaur costumes and sequin headbands than shirts, boaters and blazers.
At secondary school, I finally got to wear a uniform – and realised how stifling they can be. It was very strict and very Catholic – a below-the-knee kilt was required, which I’d roll up to make into a mini-skirt. The nuns were not impressed. It wasn’t until I joined the sixth form of a boys’ school in London, where the uniform was a suit of sorts, that I could finally live my St Trinian’s-style dream.
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Uniforms are entrenched in tradition. They set expectations to the world around us about who we are and what we will go on to be. But as with the canon of art history (which I was told by EH Gombrich’s The Story of Art included no contributions by women; I wrote The Story of Art Without Men to show that there were), I wanted to flip the uniform on its head and claim it as my own. In my case, it means a play on the suit, like those originally intended for boys of a certain class. Because how are we ever going to move forward if we don’t blow expectations out of the water? Even though I don’t have to wear a suit now, it feels empowering to do so.
Labels from Chanel to Celine and McQueen to Victoria Beckham agree, turning to the pragmatism and functionality of suiting for AW24, demonstrating how inventive the category can be. This season they are proposed for both work and play, with dazzling checkered patterns or enlarged bows and hats, relaxed trousers and natty mini-skirts.
There is no formal uniform for the role of ‘art historian’, which, for me, involves anything from writing in the library, to putting on exhibitions and presenting arts documentaries. While Kenneth Clark fronted Civilisation (1969) in a suit and tie, John Berger famously opted for a Hawaiian shirt for the BBC’s Ways of Seeing (1972). In the 1990s, Sister Wendy Beckett kept it holy in her nun’s habit.
Equally, there are no official ‘rules’ for what an artist should wear – but nevertheless they often end up gravitating towards their own uniforms. Wearing one is liberating when it’s by choice: it can free up space in your mind to be creative.
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Some artists keep it radically simple. Leonora Carrington exclusively wore grey, despite painting the most fantastical, colourful and surreal paintings in her adopted home of Mexico City. Georgia O’Keeffe opted for different iterations of the same black and white suit (as she said, for ‘practicality’), but switched it up with different pleats, collar details
or brooches. Her sequential way of dressing chimed with her sequential painting style: she captured the New Mexican desert over and over again.
For others, their daily uniform becomes an expression and sometimes almost an extension of the art. Frida Kahlo wore Indigenous dress from Mexico and Guatemala to show off her cultural identity and interest in artisanal clothing.
Today, artist Yayoi Kusama matches her polka-dot-filled paintings and mirror rooms by dressing in dizzyingly dotty patterns. Feminist legend Judy Chicago is never not sporting a
multi-coloured bob or blue or pink glasses. It’s not surprising Louis Vuitton and Dior have collaborated with both.
I have noticed in adulthood that the school-uniform suit has been my go-to, but always with a twist: think Elle Woods at Harvard. I find it strikes the balance between studious and serious, fun and flamboyant. For the opening of the first exhibition I curated when I was 23, I wore a black-velvet suit embossed with pink and red flowers (with matching shoes!) by
Alexa Chung’s much-missed namesake fashion label. I felt so cool in it: smart but celebratory. And that felt appropriate: you’re there to champion the art.
Today, I go for Bella Freud’s ‘Sixties Françoise Hardy meets Eighties Bowie’ tailoring, and feel like a girl who can party all night but be in the library by the morning. The suits cinch the waist, rockify the lapels and come in an array of flare width. I have them in almost every colour and material, from green velvet to brown corduroy; it’s the school uniform I always dreamt of. The artist Chantal Joffe, who I’ve sat for about 20 times, painted me in a blue one on my 29th birthday and, later that year, in yellow (shown on Victoria Miro’s booth at Frieze).
This summer, Bella noticed I was a fan and invited me to co-host an art-history school with her. She made folders filled with print-outs of artworks, wrote ‘ART’ on the cover in her iconic handwriting, and dressed us in matching uniforms – she in blue (with an untied neck bow), and me in pink (with mine tied up). I love how an almost identical suit can look different and elicit differing attitudes, depending on how it’s styled. I recycled the pink (this time, with the waistcoat) for a talk I gave at the Tate.
There’s something liberating about being a woman and wearing a great suit. It’s fun to play with traditional codes; it’s rebellious. Wearing a ‘school uniform’, as someone who no longer attends school, you feel like you’re still learning, but don’t have to comply with the rules. It is to get rid of the pressures, stereotypes and expectations, reclaim traditions, rewrite the rules and rip up the canon – all things I strive to do in my work. So whether your uniform is a habit or a Hawaiian shirt, it’s about wearing it on your own terms – and everyone being invited to do the same.
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