Baudelaire described the ‘aristocratic pleasure of displeasing.’ Lucian Freud, his daughter Bella recalls, ‘often looked glamorous, though sometimes he looked like a tramp: clothes full of holes. When he wore Savile Row suits and grey flannel(English flannel, from Welsh gwlanen, wool) - fabric whipped More it was always with a scarf rather than a tie. He never tried to blend in. He pleased himself.’

Still a teenager, he borrows a friend’s father’s suit: ‘dark-grey flannel, horrible pinstriped. We called it “The Suit”. There was a pub in Shepherd’s Market that I was turned out of; I asked the man why: no reason given. That’s why I wore The Suit.’

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, woolcontinuous growth fiber of animal origin (alpaca, camel, Kas More 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, cottonnatural cellulosic textile fiber constituting the seminal ha More or shetland sweaters, a grey, white, or patterned jacquardloom invented by Joseph-Marie Jacquard at the beginning of t More 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).

He declared ‘When I paint clothes I am really painting naked people who are covered in clothes.’ Several portraits are marked out by clothing: Man in a Blue Shirt, Girl in a Beret, Man in a Blue Scarf. During a session for the latter, Freud is upset, repeats ‘There must be something wrong with me; I don’t know why I can’t mix this blue color today.’ It is only when he returns home that the sitter noticed his scarf that day was not his usual. Freud liked to agree on clothes: of a shirt, ‘ “as soon as I had put it in I began to see how it could work structurally.” I am not quite sure what he means by that, except that one of my ear lobes soon turned the very same pink.’ Elsewhere: chunky brown brogues, a waistcoat with the last button undone, a signet ring, the top of a pocket square, an intricate tweedwoolen fabric, more or less rustic, woven with multicolored More. A sitter recalls choosing a Timothy Everest suit, a Volpe shirt and a Turnbull & Asser tie: ‘it was very frayed by the time he finished.’ To his biographer, Freud confessed: ‘I want the person looking to say not ‘who’s that in a blue shirt?’ but ‘who’s that? Oh, they’re wearing a shirt.’ Which is different isn’t it?’

A late documentary is called Small Gestures in Empty Rooms: Freud drives fast through Notting Hill, looks at a bird in Hampstead. The images of his falconry recall an early profile for Vogue. Wearing a Merchant Navy sweater, kept from his service (SS Baltrover), he sat for photographer Clifford Coffin in his Paddington room. On his hand, one of the two sparrowhawks he lived with then. ‘If you touch wild birds, it’s a marvelous feeling.’