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René Magritte with his painting Le Barbare (The Barbarian), 1938.
René Magritte’s Son of Man (1964) is one of the most famous and widely recognized paintings the surrealist artist ever made. The man wearing a bowler hat, red tie, and overcoat, his face hidden by a green apple, is, of course, Magritte himself. There was no mistaking his silhouette: the artist forever wore a bowler hat and used it as a motif in many paintings. In Man in Bowler Hat from that same year, the face is obscured by a white bird; in a 1955 image, The Mysteries of the Horizon, three men in bowlers stand beneath three crescent moons. The bourgeois headwear and the artist’s grasp of the absurd seemed to go together perfectly. Magritte’s metaphors are often honed through clothing: The Red Model (1934) shows a pair of boots that morph into bare feet—cleverly reimagined in Comme des Garçons’s 2009 collection, which included shoes with trompe l’oeil feet. Opening Ceremony’s 2014 Ceci ne-pas un Shirt collection featured his visuals on skirts, dresses, bomber jackets, T-shirts, and sweaters. In 2016, accessory designer Olympia Le-Tan made silk-embroidered handbags depicting famous Magritte works, including the painted woman’s eye in Objet Peint: Oeil. Magritte himself was a fastidious dresser, always dapper in suiting, shirt, tie, and scarf. He was involved in the fashion world, too; while working as a commercial artist, he produced imagery for Brussels-based couture house Norine as well as a catalogue in collaboration with poet Paul Nougé for Maison Samuel’s 1928 fur collection. The latter is regarded as a classic example of an innovative fusion of graphic art and high style.