Imagine all the people who could do with the former Beatle as a sartorial role model.

On 9 October 1940, at Liverpool Maternity Hospital, Mr John Winston Lennon was born. He would come to embody ideals of love, not war. He was one quarter of the most famous, and possibly most stylish, band to ever exist. The Beatles transformed society. They were the driving force behind everything that was exciting about the 1960s, and, with their producer Sir George Martin, they changed how music was made. Along the way, the Fab Four also upended fashion. Whether he wore a black suit or a rollneck sweater, Mr Lennon’s style seemed singular, shining with a greater wattage than Sir Ringo Starr, Sir Paul McCartney or Mr George Harrison. Much like his acerbic one-liners, it seemed so effortless – his wardrobe was as sharp as his wit.

To mark his birthday tomorrow, Thames & Hudson publish Imagine John Yoko, a book curated by his widow Ms Yoko Ono. It tells the revelatory story of the making of the album Imagine – the title track of which would come to define Mr Lennon’s legacy.

To celebrate Mr Lennon’s life, we explore some of his most iconic looks, and the different periods which gave birth to them. Here are five that prove he was one of the most stylish musicians ever.

On 24 June 1965, The Beatles performed a concert at the Velodromo Vigorelli in Milan, but from this photo you’d be forgiven for thinking Mr John Lennon was playing the guitar in the 2000s. Wearing a black suit, coupled with a white shirt, loose tie and Breton cap, his style smacks of Mr Hedi Slimane. It is also, perhaps, the quintessential look that we associate with The Beatles in the early 1960s, prescribed by their then manager, Mr Brian Epstein. The suits were often accompanied by the famous “Beatle boot” – a tight-fitting Cuban-heeled boot of their own invention.

Not many people can pull off an all-white look. And even fewer can do so sitting next to their newlywed wife dressed in all but the same. But, at that time, Mr John Lennon and Ms Yoko Ono seemed to exist in a stratosphere of their own. “She’s taught me everything I fucking know,” Mr Lennon famously said in an interview with Mr David Sheff for Playboy magazine in 1980, the year he died. The white suit would crop up again in August 1969, when Mr Lennon wore it for the Abbey Road cover shoot. He looked like an off-duty saint.

On 11 February 1970, Mr Lennon became the first member of The Beatles to appear on Top Of The Pops since the band’s split. He was dressed in a denim jacket with a “people for peace” patch, with fuzzily chopped hair and a fleur-de-lis print shirt. It was a conscious and very deliberate demonstration of his opposition to the Vietnam War. He and Ms Ono were poster children for pacifism – a striking example of which was their week-long “bed-in for peace” at the Amsterdam Hilton in 1969.

In 1967, the Summer of Love was a heady time of lysergically altered mindsets, free love and psychedelic music, movements that The Beatles came to champion and lead (a little too enthusiastically at times – collectively, the Fab Four had more drug arrests than The Rolling Stones in the 1970s). It was a truly prolific time for the band, with Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour both released in 1967. Here, dressed in a paisley shirt with purple trousers, Mr Lennon looks like the king of the King’s Road, and, well, he probably was at this point.

Imagine John Yoko (Thames & Hudson) is out 9 October

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