Pablo Picasso Is the Unheralded King of Summer Style

Pablo Picasso was a genius—at having a great summer.

If you’re in pursuit of a big late-summer reading project, I recommend digging into John Richardson’s masterful biographies of Picasso and Francoise Gilot’s memoir of her life with the artist, which reveal the scope of Picasso’s, shall we say, complicated legacy. (He once cut fellow cubist Georges Braque out of his life because he didn’t offer Picasso and Gilot lunch during a studio visit.)

If you're in pursuit of a big late-summer dressing project, I recommend digging into Picasso's closet. History, by which I mean comic strips, has reduced Picasso’s wardrobe achievements to the Petit Bateau striped shirt, but much like the man’s life and work, Picasso’s summer wardrobe takes on new qualities with closer study. And to paraphrase the man himself, great dressers steal.

In fact, during the summer—spent largely in the South of France, shuttling between beach, studio, and villa (with occasional visits to an ex-wife or lover’s house)—Picasso almost exclusively wore no shirt at all, or a camp shirt left unbuttoned, with shorts and house slippers or espadrilles. Stocky and 5’3’’, Picasso didn’t have the body of a gym rat: for one photo, he stripped off his white T-shirt and tucked it into his belt like a mechanic’s rag, one of many times he showed off his modest belly. It only worked to add to the primal mystique of his look. Indeed, although we are now firmly in throes of August, and many of us may not be beachbound or even beach-adjacent, the temperatures remain high and the possibility of looking fresh and keeping cool feels unreachable. Instead, embrace Picassocore: a mix of stuff lying around the floor—or even rejected by someone else in or out of your life—and pieces from, say, your local drugstore’s Seasonal aisle. It is now the time to have a Picassocore summer.

A true modernist, Picasso pared his wardrobe back to its most essential elements: short-shorts, slippers, and the occasional shirt. Extensive research by me, one of the world’s premiere amateur outfit historians, suggests that Picasso rose each day, threw on this simple ensemble, and spent a lot of time doing crafts and relaxing. He let his shirts (and legs) do most of the talking—a gingham-check shirt with a striped collar, say, or a florid paisley print. He signed autographs for a village grandmother and two punks wearing a Matisse-like patterned shirt and leather flats. In another image, he sits with legs crossed at a table in his home near Cannes, wearing short-shorts, Loewe-esque leather slip-ons with rope soles, and a white button-up with a logo on the breast. Upon closer inspection, the logo reads, in Picasso’s own handwriting, “Picasso.” Why get your shirts monogrammed when you could just autograph them instead?

Picassocore represents the pinnacle of sartorial form following mischievous, sweltering function. Picasso often met up with very fancy Americans Sara and Gerald Murphy, who served cold sherry and tiny biscuits around 11 am on the shore near Antibes. He usually capped this morning aperitif off with a cigarette; perhaps no one has so successfully smoked on the beach except Sienna Miller. Somewhat infamously, he stood before the waves shirtless and tried on a bull mask, posing victoriously. Of course, headgear is an essential element of Picassocore—he had a formidable collection of big straw hats. No baseball caps for this macho man.

But it is not merely the aesthetic that conjures a Picassocore summer. Perhaps you’re tired of baking bread and knitting? Well: in the south of France, Picasso drew all over everything, sometimes for a small audience. He decided to start making pottery, he doodled on the sidewalk, he painted a mural on his garage door (his landlord made him paint it back), he chatted up strangers on the beach. If Picasso could paint over his mural at his landlord’s behest, why can’t you? All of these are possibilities that remain available to anyone, regardless of whether they are the formative voice of modernism in the history of 20th century art. That’s the beauty of Picassocore.

Why not pull on the same pair of short-shorts (be they Patagonia Baggies, or perhaps Raf Simons boxer shorts) everyday, with a ritzy camp shirt and a pair of house shoes or even bedroom slippers? Let the al fresco and the...in fresco meld. Somewhere between Jacquemus, Casablanca, your brother’s rejected shirts, the gas station flip-flop offerings, and your new shipment of sidewalk chalk, is your Picassocore summer.