In Artist Uniform, a column for Highsnobiety, Chris Erik Thomas traces how personal style shapes an artist's identity.

The first thing to know about Gilbert & George, the fashionable British artist duo who’ve exclusively worn heavy tweed suits since the late 1960s, is that they’re, ironically, not interested in fashion. 

At least, that’s what they said to style historian Pamela Golbin in 2020. “We never looked at fashion,” Gilbert said, as George chimed in: “If you put a suit from every decade of the last hundred years into a computer and you press the ‘average’ button, it would come up with something like the suits we wear every day.”

The pair’s public uniform is, of course, anything but average. Since meeting in a sculpture class at Saint Martin’s School of Art in 1967, Gilbert & George have been an inseparable duo — a “living sculpture,” as they’ve called themselves. There’s a sharp contrast between the art and the artist; They’ve spent decades suited up in traditional, slightly drab suits, yet their art is kaleidoscopically colorful, often rendered in a stained-glass motif.

As vibrant as their works may be, everything comes back to the tweed arrangement they wear each day. The suits are rooted in their own working-class backgrounds — and made not by Savile Row tailors but by immigrants from their neighborhood tailoring shops in Spitalfields, East London.

As normal as they might appear now, after all these years, suits are still suits: a matching arrangement of clothes signifying both power and professionalism. The weight of this symbolism is why the suit has remained a cultural signifier for over a century, inviting countless designers to put their own spin on the silhouette. Yves Saint Laurent debuted his groundbreaking Le Smoking tuxedo for women in the swinging ‘60s, Giorgio Armani's power suits defined the ‘80s, and the slinky, ’70s-inspiring suiting of Tom Ford’s Gucci tenure epitomized early-‘00s sex appeal. 

This breadth of interpretations on the suit is also, conversely, why Gilbert & George’s work hits; as fashion leaps from grunge to streetwear to quiet luxury and back again, the duo’s uniform has stayed exactly the same. Unsurprisingly, several fashion designers have looked to Gilbert & George as seasonal muses. 

Jeremy Scott based Moschino’s Fall/Winter 2016 season on the duo, releasing a saturated, cartoonish collection of subversive outfits (including, of course, suiting) that looked like paintings come to life. Jonathan Anderson followed in 2018, with his eponymous luxury label releasing a capsule collection of leather biker jackets, striped tops, and latex tees based around three key Gilbert & George works — Guard Plants (1980), Dog Boy (1980) and Heavy (1988). And a year later, Supreme dropped a series of tees, hoodies, and skateboards embossed with images from the duo’s 1984 Pictures series. 

Though Gilbert & George have been influential enough in their own way for half a century, their biggest stage yet is just around the corner. Next year, the pair will stage a major two-city exhibition across Japan — first at Kyoto Seika Art Museum in May, then at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo in September. 

With suiting entering a new era marked by bold cuts and colors rooted in nonconformity, seeing this duo given their due, whose wardrobe has mastered rebelliousness through sartorial conservatism, feels appropriately against the grain.

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