By the time 600 drones redrew A Bigger Splash and Portrait of an Artist over the night sky in Bradford this year, David Hockney felt less like a painter and more like shared muscle memory. We recognize him before we name him. The peroxide fringe that started with a Clairol ad in the sixties. The round, black glasses that turned his face into a kind of logo. The cardigans that seldom match the shirt, the ties that ignore harmony.

Most of us met him first through images rather than biography. Pool paintings printed on student posters. Double portraits on museum tote bags. Later, the record-breaking Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), the Tate retrospective that clogged Instagram feeds, the iPad drawings from Yorkshire that have now sold for millions and fed into this year’s Fondation Louis Vuitton survey. Throughout it all, his clothes remained in step with the work. Early studio pictures show a skinny kid in stripes in a cramped London print shop. In California, he slips into rumpled suits, goofy ties and sweater vests, always a little off-key in the most precise way.

Fashion has been mirroring him back for decades. Burberry built collections on his palette. He sits in Vanity Fair’s International Best Dressed Hall of Fame not as a polished mascot, but as proof that consistency can become its own kind of glamour. The point is not polish, but a lifelong commitment to seeing color properly, then wearing it as plainly as possible.

On the set of Ubu Roi, Hockney does a Mod professor thing wearing a neat, trim suit, small lapels........

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