Picasso said: 'There's only one man in Paris who knows how to dress and that is Modigliani.' He didn't say that as a joke. Modigliani, poor as he was, even to the extent of having to borrow three sous for the underground to go to the literary evenings at the Closerie des Lilas, was not only refined, but had an eclectic elegance. He was the first man in Paris to wear a shirt made of cretonne. God knows this fashion has got all over the world, and with what variations! He had colour harmonies in dressing that were all his own. And since I am talking about clothes, I'll tell the tale of a corduroy coat. It belonged to Picasso, was as stiff as armour, and had a turned-down collar lined with woollen cloth, very Spanish in style, and it buttoned-if you could button it-right up. Picasso, having got a bit fatter, gave it to me. But I could never wear this hard shell and I made a present of it to Dedo, who wore it with his usual chic. We gummed inside it the story of this coat.

Dedo (in these days) had done little but sculpture and enormous drawings, vaguely coloured. These works denoted a knowledge of Oriental and Negro art. Everything in Dedo tended towards purity in art. His insupportable pride, his black ingratitude, his haughtiness, did not exclude familiarity. Yet all that was nothing but a need for crystalline purity, a trueness to himself in life as in art. He was cutting, but as fragile as glass; also as inhuman as glass, so to say. And that was very characteristic of the period, which talked of nothing but purity in art and strove for nothing else. Dedo was to the last degree a purist. His mania for purity went so far as to make him seek out Negroes, jail-birds, tramps, to record the purity of the lines in his drawings.

I think that Dedo was frightened of colour that was not pure. Chez Dedo this wasn't to be in the fashion but a real need of his temperament.

From: Pierre Sichel, Modigliani, New York (Dutton) 1976, p. 180