Later, he preferred Huntsman. His biographer William Feaver notes the years of his orders: 1973, 1978, 1993 and 1995. A picture taken in 1975 shows him next to his children, Ali and Rose. They wear dungarees, fur, long hair. Freud prefers a thin white scarf, and a double-breasted flannel suit. ‘My father’s clothes in the picture are rakishly conventional. Even the checked chef’s trousers that he wore for work – bought from Denny’s in Soho, belted at the waist and covered in paint – were stylish and elegant.’ ‘Lunchtime. He changed out of his chef’s trousers behind a chair and emerged in a green cord suit.’ He did not always change. Carnera, head-cutter at Huntsman, recalls finding paint smears on the artist’s suits: Freud’s taste was for soft flannel, wool and worsteds; for coats, cashmere or heavy wool. Few vents, and on occasion, few pockets. Even then, he felt hesitant about wearing suits immediately after their delivery: ‘I’ve got some clothes made five or six years ago, the last time I was at the tailor’s, that I still haven’t worn. It’s exactly like…moving into a new place.’ Later still, he loosened into Zilli leather, cotton or shetland sweaters, a grey, white, or patterned jacquard scarf, baggy white trousers, and brown boots, without laces. In Painter Working, Reflection (1992), those are all he wears.
His grey suit struck those who met him. It appears in his self-portraits: shiny in Self-Portrait in Reflection (1965), weathered in Self-Portrait (2002). According to one of his students at the Slade School of Fine Art: ‘You could sense his presence in the corridors of the Slade before you saw him. He always wore grey suits and white shirts and his belt always looked very tight around his slim waist. Somehow or other he managed to be almost painfully nervous and menacing at the same time. When people imitated him they raised an imagined Gauloise to their lips’ (Freud did not smoke).
