The power play of dressing for a portrait

When Bella Lack was invited to sit for a collection of photographic portraits depicting the young environmental movement in the UK, she was conscious that her clothes would be scrutinised.

“You do have to consider what you wear,” she says. “As a campaigner, people try to delegitimise what you say if you don’t fulfil the idea of being perfect. If I had been wearing fast fashion, I would have been called a hypocrite.” She selected carefully: plain blue cardigan and pinstripe trousers, both bought on Depop, the second-hand clothing marketplace where she buys most of her clothes. “I didn’t care what I looked like. I just didn’t want to wear anything with a harmful impact.”

Her portrait is now on display in the National Portrait Gallery in London, which reopened this week after a three-year refurbishment.

Clothes in portraiture are rarely accidental, even if what they convey can be. Think of works in the NPG’s permanent collection, such as Queen Elizabeth I’s “Darnley Portrait”, painted in about 1575 by an unknown artist, the monarch’s delicate body made masculine with her gown’s voluminous shoulders and sleeves. Or Richard Avedon’s 1960 photograph of WH Auden in a fierce New York snowstorm, wearing a light overcoat and ordinary shoes, an English poet in self-imposed exile. Or Stormzy, now a platinum-selling grime artist, shot by Olivia Rose when he was less well known, sitting in a London backyard wearing head-to-toe Adidas.

“Portraiture has historically been about the assertion of power,” says Joanna Woodall, a historian at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and author of Portraiture: Facing the Subject. “It is a performance, not a representation of reality.”

The role of clothing in portraiture has evolved with technology. Before the arrival of cheap, widespread photography, people portrayed in western art were mostly an elite class (bar an occasional appearance from servants and enslaved people). “As photography developed, the ambition to represent an individual essence became greater,” says Clare Freestone, curator of photography at the NPG.

With photography, from the late 19th century and into the 20th, individuality was a new and valuable currency, says Woodall, and sitters wanted to stand out. They chose clothes “as an expression of distinctiveness — what we would call their individuality”.

In the digital age, another shift. Woodall points to Sam Taylor-Johnson’s video portrait of David Beckham from 2004, a 107-minute, close-up film capturing the footballer asleep — or at least we assume he is — wearing nothing but tattoos and a stack of expensive jewellery. The film is also in the NPG collection. “It’s doing something quite radical,” says Woodall. “We are watching him, rather than having him imposed upon us.”

When Olivia Rose was commissioned to photograph Stormzy in 2016, she briefed him to wear whatever he liked, as long as he felt as if he were dressed up. The grime artist, who had yet to capture international attention, wanted to present himself to the world on his own terms. “Stormzy holds gravitas in a tracksuit,” says Rose.

The NPG now has three Stormzy portraits in its collection, including a second by Rose of him with his mother Abigail Owuo, taken in a pub before he addressed the Oxford Guild. Also taken in 2016, it is very different in tone from the lone man in a tracksuit top with his gaze averted. This time, Stormzy and his mother face the camera with steady, confident eyes, he in a black ensemble, his mother in a floral dress that echoes the foliage of a wall painting behind them.

Where does all this leave the 21st-century sitter trying to decide what to wear? Paul Wetherell, a celebrity and editorial photographer, has four contemporary portraits in the NPG collection: of actors Lily James and Matt Smith, former Burberry president Christopher Bailey and his family, and model Adwoa Aboah in a joint portrait with Cara Delevingne.

What’s striking about Wetherell’s portraits is how varied his sitters’ clothes are, from Smith’s monochromatic suit, understated to the point of boring, to Aboah in an oversized patterned fleece with enormous shoulders and sleeves. Wetherell elevated Smith’s suit by focusing the camera’s attention on the actor’s strikingly feminine jewellery — a detail the photographer says he, rather than Smith, chose to push to the foreground.

The key to a successful portrait, says Wetherell, is trust between artist and sitter. “Sometimes, I can see things [a sitter] can’t see in the function of clothing,” he says. “They think they might look stupid, but I know the lighting, the procedure, the process, and so I have to persuade them to try.” His tactic does not always work: one serious actor refused to be coaxed into a bunny suit.

Wetherell says a good stylist will build up a three-way relationship with a sitter, and a subject must have input or it won’t work. “Body shape, mood, height, all comes into it,” he adds. “I want the picture to be as flattering as possible.” Some sitters, he says, are “up for anything”. He recalls the US actor Woody Harrelson being easily persuaded to try on outlandish, outsized Stella McCartney knitwear for Fantastic Man magazine in 2017, for example, which from a photographer’s point of view, he says, helped express his subject’s natural exuberance. “But some people have bad taste,” he says. How does he handle that? “I distract them by rambling on, so they’re not aware of [outfit] plans changing.”

Whether subjects are staged and styled or insist on wearing their own outfits, says Woodall, clothes for portraits are always laden with code. “Because that’s what portraiture is,” she says. “It says ‘I am worthy of being perpetuated and you will recognise me.’”

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