The vogue author Charlie Porter has at all times been a compulsive reader of the language of garments, his eye drawn irresistibly to the color of a stranger’s coat; to the minimize of their swimsuit or the emblem 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 generally? “Not exactly.” He laughs. “But the pandemic has given me quite a nice rest from it.”
I meet Porter, the writer of an eclectic however invigorating new ebook about artists’ garments, within the public backyard at Arnold Circus, close to his residence in Shoreditch, east London – and, naturally, my first query has to do along with his personal look. Never thoughts his painters and sculptors. What is he carrying in the present day? Porter regards himself as “quite a mess, usually,” however sure, 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 embellished with mirror work. Opening it, he reveals an off-white artist’s smock from Labour and Wait, hipster purveyor of all that’s practical, from aprons to watering cans, which he favours for the liberty of motion it permits in addition to for its “space-age” collar. This is matched to a pair of striped trousers whose provenance he can’t fairly bear in mind. Finally, there are his loafers, that are Gucci and about 15 years outdated.
Porter, who’s 47, has at all times liked vogue. As a youngster, he would journey to London from his residence in rural Northamptonshire, and rifle the discount bin at Sign of the Times, the cult membership-put on store 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.”
Sarah Lucas Self-portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996, C-print. Photograph: Sarah Lucas/Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London
But his new ebook was born (initially, at the very least) of frustration with vogue as a lot 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 vogue journalism, the trade units synthetic limits; those that report on it are, by necessity, obsessive about tendencies. But most individuals’s wardrobes have extra 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 select artists, although? Is this as a result of he believes their aesthetic sensibilities are extra finely tuned than our personal? “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 ebook – it’s populated by the likes of Frida Kahlo and Andy Warhol, in addition to by much less properly-identified names – are, he believes, liberated in a method that we’d all prefer to be, if solely we had the chance (or the braveness). “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 bit aside from some of his different topics given that she liked fancy, costly garments. “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.”
‘The average older woman’s garments are appalling’: sculptor Barbara Hepworth in St Ives, 1957. Photograph: Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images
On this rail, Porter discovered, considerably to his pleasure, a tuxedo coat by Lang that had been made for the mannequin Stephanie Seymour to put on in his spring/summer time 1999 present, in Paris. But whether or not flashy or not, for Bourgeois garments have been additionally repositories of reminiscence. “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 garments like a uniform, the higher to free their minds to consider different issues – and, maybe, to make themselves immediately 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 younger David Hockney, alternatively, used his look – the other of a uniform, even his tank tops and ties gave him the air of a captivating, overgrown schoolboy – to sign 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.’”
Bright flash: David Hockney at residence in London in 2015. He has at all times favoured shiny colors since arriving within the capital as a scholar in 1959. Photograph: Ben Quinton/Ben Quinton (commissioned)
For a second, Porter appears at my lengthy, striped wool scarf, which can also be brightly colored. “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 ebook dedicated to feminine artists that make for probably the most fascinating studying, their garments liberating them by giving them permission to be totally different in a world the place everybody else is in twinsets and pearls: the painter Agnes Martin, in her spattered overalls and quilted jackets; the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, in her boiler fits. “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 good friend, Margaret Gardiner, of her want to seek out garments higher suited to how she felt on the within. “The average older woman’s clothes are appalling,” she famous. “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 just for the way in which it units out how she’ll gown within the subsequent many years (elasticated waists, zipped jackets, slacks, flat footwear), but additionally for the small indicators of embarrassment (“this all sounds a bit silly”) she reveals at taking an curiosity in such issues. “We still find it difficult to talk about clothing in an honest way. We fear doing so is trivial, superficial.”
Other feminine artists within the ebook use garments as half of their observe. Porter writes of Sarah Lucas, and the work she has produced from worn-in Doc Martens and outdated tights; of Anthea Hamilton, whose efficiency piece The Squash, staged at Tate Britain, concerned a faceless character in a squash-formed helmet made in collaboration with vogue home Loewe, and 14 totally different costumes.
“Clothes are very important in my work,” the artist Cindy Sherman tells him (disguised in wigs, heavy make-up and costumes she finds in thrift shops, she takes on a number of personas in her outsize pictures). “They play a major factor in giving clues to a character’s personality.”
All change: Cindy Sherman’s Untitled 2008 Chromogenic print. The artist typically wears wigs and heavy make-up, and clothes up in garments from charity retailers. Photograph: Cindy Sherman/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Most fascinating of all is Lynn Hershman Leeson, a efficiency artist who in 1973 remodeled herself into an art work referred to as Roberta Breitmore, a lady whose life she would stay for the subsequent 5 years. Roberta wore the identical garments daily: a patterned gown and a brown and cream cardigan purchased in a sale for $5.99 (the tag remained on the garments, seen to everybody she met). The piece was concerning the “trap” of the feminine expertise 1970s America – although sarcastically her alter ego gave Leeson herself a brand new and thrilling freedom (“I had a lot of clothes,” she tells Porter in his ebook. “Too many clothes.”)
Porter, whose mother and father are each artists, learn philosophy at King’s College London. He did work expertise at Vogue. Then labored on the Guardian, GQ and the FT, the place he was menswear critic till 2018. But he thinks he’s most likely achieved with that world now (having completed a novel, he hopes to write down one other ebook about vogue). “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 house – commercially, and on the web page – for younger designers now; an excessive amount of emphasis on celeb. But this isn’t to say he feels any much less strongly about vogue’s significance. “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 school, vogue was thrilling: designers reminiscent of Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan have been breaking by, and people who wrote about them had, he insists, a sure “intellectual rigour”. Porter mourns these days now, and worries, too, about the place the web will take vogue. But he believes issues are additionally altering. People are considering extra about the place their garments come from and the place they’ll go once they die. For his half, he’s decided to put on as many of his outdated garments as he can, for so long as he can (therefore the traditional Gucci loafers).
The chief beneficiary of his years on the entrance row is the V&A, to whose costume division he has up to now donated 82 gadgets. “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 additionally tinged, ever so barely, with satisfaction.
What Artists Wear by Charlie Porter is revealed on 27 May at £14.99. Buy a duplicate for £13.04 at guardianbookshop.com