“Picasso is a little model,” Sapone told Time magazine in 1971.

“I think Picasso liked that, as it helped him to project this larger-than-life personality.” Picasso would pay his tailor in paintings and drawings and in April 1960 painted his portrait, including an exceptionally phallic fish. “Sapone’s clothes were incredibly distinctive,” says Christie’s Tudor Davies, who once organised an exhibition of his work. Others included a Cubist-style shirt that Picasso would wear only in private and outfits that were often engineered to lengthen his diminutive frame. One of the first garments he created for the painter was a pair of striped trousers “à la Courbet” – an homage to Gustave Courbet’s “Autoportrait Au Col Rayé” (a self-portrait of the artist wearing a striped collar). The Italian tailor Michel Sapone dressed Picasso for 16 years, producing more than 100 jackets and 200 pairs of trousers – always without the artist’s direction. In one picture taken at the time, Picasso, then 37, is dressed in the quintessentially English outfit of a three-piece suit, watch chain and brogues, his hair neatly greased into a side parting.Īlways keen to subvert the prosaic, Picasso’s jackets would be commissioned to be tighter than they needed to be or baggier than was feasible – anything to look different or to generate attention. For instance, while he was no stranger to Savile Row – when he spent ten weeks in London during the summer of 1919, designing scenery and costumes for The Three-Cornered Hat, a Ballet Russes production directed by the company’s impresario, Sergei Diaghilev, which premiered that year, his style transformed from that of a bohemian artist to a dapper English gentleman – when he had a pair of trousers made at Anderson & Sheppard he asked for the front panel to be cut from navy cloth, the back in scarlet. One of the ways he did this was through what he wore. Tyrannical, entitled and possessed of a massive ego, he used an almost cynical playfulness to project another face to the world. Picasso completely understood the power of marketing and throughout his career used everything in his power to publicly ameliorate his own personality. Playful yet almost myopic in his consistency, his preoccupation with jaunty Breton sweaters and polo shirts, natty primary-hued cords and jazzy tartan trousers affirmed him as one of the more ‘off-kilter’ style leaders of his generation.”īut it wasn’t all about the Breton top. “And just as Picasso made his name through the prism of cubism, he also manufactured a unique identity through the prism of his wardrobe. “It takes an artist to understand the power of sticking to a singular aesthetic,” says Teo van den Broeke, GQ’s Style And Grooming Director. It wasn’t enough to have completely reinvented Western painting, jettisoned idealised notions of beauty and banished conventions of perspective (for starters), he needed a platform for the fripperies that surrounded his genius, needed to be appreciated for the calculatedly bohemian way in which he conducted himself. Picasso’s life was an exercise in self-mythology.

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