How appropriate that the late David Hockney favoured that ash blonde hair colour, given that the chain-smoker was said to get through 100 cigarettes a day? And not just any old fags: the long, slender and upmarket Davidoff Magnum Classic, of which he was said to keep a store of 2,000 at home for emergencies. Hockney said they helped him concentrate. But this everyday accessory was also a yellowed two-fingers to anyone who wanted to close down what he saw as his right to live as he chose. More than that – and let’s hope no school kids are reading – they imbued him with an old Hollywood, rebel cool, especially in more anti-tab times. ‘You can’t have a smoke-free Bohemia,’ as he once noted.
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While Hockney, who died at the age of 88 last week, will rightly be remembered for his art, his art of style should also not be forgotten. Take that hair colour: he went bottle blonde in the 1960s after seeing a Clairol commercial on TV in New York intoning that ‘everybody should go blonde’. It’s probable the ad was not aimed at any man from Bradford – or any man of that era – but Hockney made his luminous do, often worn in Boris Johnson’s wind-tunnel look, one of his many visual trademarks. It would be outgunned only later in life, after he’d greyed, by those full-rimmed spectacles, akin to Mr Toad’s driving goggles, invariably seen under a baseball cap or a flat cap. Well, he was a Yorkshireman.
