When I started in 1992, I really thought the ‘Vogue’ fashion department was one of the most frightening places on the planet. Hamish Bowles Read Quote
Personally, of course it’s exasperating when people think you’re just swanning around in Europe, going to the occasional fashion show and then being glamorous at a party. Hamish Bowles Read Quote
Occasionally, I will come across something that has lost its label over the years – maybe the client didn’t want to declare the dress at customs and took the label out – but I’ll recognize it from an image that I’ve seen in Vogue, or a little thumbnail sketch. Hamish Bowles Read Quote
There are so many different criteria for my collecting, and I have to confess that the goalposts do shift. But obviously, with my background, I am particularly drawn to things that have been documented in contemporary magazines. Hamish Bowles Read Quote
This is how I started: My mom was crazy for antique shops and junk shops, and my sister and I would play this game where, if we were driving with my parents and saw a junk shop or an antique shop, we’d scream at the top of our lungs. My poor father would have heart failure and screech to a halt, and we’d leap out and go and explore. Hamish Bowles Read Quote
My mother is the sort of woman who not only can raise a chicken and roast it to moist perfection but, as she proved to my openmouthed sister and me on a family holiday to Morocco when we were very young, can barter for one in a market, kill it, pluck it, and then cook it to perfection. Hamish Bowles Read Quote
After student years of flat-sharing and living with other people’s taste, I went into decorating overdrive when I acquired my first apartment – its floor plan not much bigger than the vintage Hermes scarves I then wore side-knotted on my head, pirate-style. Hamish Bowles Read Quote
My childhood memories seem to be wreathed in the twin and far from harmonious olfactory sensations of patchouli oil and caustic soda. Hamish Bowles Read Quote
My obsession with accumulation, which at times has taken on the whisper of a psychic illness – as anyone who has experienced the ode to the Collyer brothers that is my ‘Vogue’ office will concur – began in infancy. Hamish Bowles Read Quote
I was a fashion editor for years in London before I came to ‘Vogue,’ and I spent my life arranging the folds of a ball gown skirt for a picture and pinning fabric and using all those stylist tricks. And you don’t have to do that now because they can do it in Photoshop. Hamish Bowles Read Quote
