It was in 1992 when Hamish Bowles crossed the pond, swapping London and Harpers Queen for New York and Vogue. “It was terrifying,” he said of the move, with his all-knowing smile, but “Anna [Wintour]…she was very firm.”
Bowles is now living again in London, where he’s the creative director at-large of World of Interiors, but he’s back in New York to pick up the CFDA Founder’s Award in honor of Eleanor Lambert. It will be presented to him by none other than Marc Jacobs, whom he has known since the designer was a budding talent and “one of the cool kids,” per Bowles, in the ’90s.
He and I are sitting in a conference room at Vogue’s offices in One World Trade Center, watching our colleagues walk by. (Our—what a crazy thing for me to say in relation to Bowles, but life will take you to unexpected places!) Virginia Smith and Nicole Phelps are all smiles as they probe him about his outfit for Monday night’s awards, and Mark Holgate stops in for a quick hello. (“Oh, sorry! Is this an interview? I just needed to say hello, Hamish!”)
When the hellos were over, he and I got down to the business of this conversation. To celebrate his well-deserved recognition, we discussed his four decades in fashion, the origins of his vintage archive, and treasured anecdotes about his larger-than-life colleagues through the years.
Congratulations on this recognition, Hamish. How do you feel about it?
Hamish Bowles: I feel very nervous. I have to write a speech, which I haven’t done yet. I have the American Ballet gala this evening and Anna [Wintour] later today at 3 p.m.
It’s a tight schedule. We appreciate you taking the time to do this. The award is in honor of Eleanor Lambert, the remarkable American publicist who founded the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Did you know her?
Yes, I was very touched by the award itself. I was very fond of Eleanor Lambert. I used to go secretly to vote on the best-dressed list with her. [Editor’s note: Lambert was the founder of the International Best Dressed Hall of Fame List, which was voted on by industry insiders.] She was a powerhouse, I must say. She lived in a fantastic Fifth Avenue apartment. Her whole mission in life had been to get away from the place she’d been born [Crawfordsville, Indiana], and she achieved that. [Laughs.]
Marc Jacobs is handing you the award, which is really fun. I don’t think he’s been to a CFDA Awards ceremony in a few years. Do you recall the first time you met him?
But he’s won so many! I don’t remember [the first time I met him], but I remember everything around it. He was the cool kid. He did these great clothes when he just started, these giant sweaters that were actually great. But I saw him at the clubs, and he was very much the cool kid.
I have to ask about your archive. Have you made any recent acquisitions?
I was at a vintage flea market in Hammersmith, and I’d done a fair bit of damage with shopping already. I was leaving, but this woman was just arriving to set up her stand. She had this thing in a bag, and I just grabbed it and said, “How much is this?” And she said, “Oh, it’s not really for sale.” In the end she decided this was probably the best bet of the day, so she gave me a prize and I bought it. I’m so excited. It was a Schiaparelli evening coat from 1937. The buttons are fake bugs in metal. It’s got Lesage embroidered sleeves. It’s very exciting.
When did you start formally collecting?
My mother used to take me on adventures to the vintage stores. She was buying furniture, which was the fashionable thing to do then. So I would go along with it, and I would buy things I could afford with my pocket money. I would collect purses and occasionally shoes, just bit by bit. I found all these letters that I wrote to my father from when my parents split up, and I said that we had gone to the beach to visit my grandmother on the Sussex coast. And I had bought some ice cream and incidentally walked into this old bookshop and got these fabulous photographs of Lily Elsie; she was this major Belle Époque star who was in [Franz] Léhar’s The Merry Widow as the widow. I was just finding these things incidentally in my day-to-day hunting for ice cream, which was rather strange.
Some things just find you.
Yes, I suppose so.
I wanted to ask about your transition from Harpers Queen in London to Vogue in New York. What was that like?
It was a very strange transition because, at Harpers Queen, I’d been made fashion director in 1987, and I worked with editors in chief who weren’t really fashion-forward in their thinking, so they left me to my own devices. I was on the road nine months out of the year because I just thought that would be the most exciting thing, for people to follow my path to Egypt or Seville or Rio [de Janeiro]. We did some quite marvelous stories. But when it came time to come to America, there was Anna [Wintour], who was very firm. [Laughs.] She wanted me to do houses and people, so that was a change. For the first six months, I suppose one could say I was depressed. I was not depressed doing what I was doing, but Anna was very untouchable, and that was rather difficult. After six months, she transformed. I think it was the result of me doing what she saw as positive things, and our relationship sort of turned. And then I was totally in, as it were. That changed everything. I felt that my voice had some weight. She was sort of putting me through my paces for six months [laughs], but after that it was glorious.
Is there a story that stands out for you that you did early on?
I remember writing about Madonna. She was in her English moment. She was married to that Englishman [Guy Ritchie], and she had sort of an English-ish accent, so I was very entertained. [Laughs.] We went to Ashcombe House, the house they had in Wiltshire. That house was very special to me because it was where Cecil Beaton lived for 15 years. It was the most magical place, and she, well, she was...
Madonna!
Yes, she was Madonna. [Laughs.] And she was in that house. It was kind of incredible. Those things were great.
Who have been your favorite designers to talk to?
Well, John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Marc Jacobs. Christian Lacroix was a real favorite. I liked some designers for the persona they created for themselves. Like Bill Blass, for instance. He had this attitude of a successful Hollywood star, but he actually came from Fort Wayne, Indiana. But there was not a trace of that. [*Laughs.] He had this marvelous apartment on Sutton Place. He was wonderful. All designers had their shtick then, and it was very amusing.
I’m a big fan of fashion documentaries, and I always thought it was quite fun to see these characters they played. I feel like that has changed over the years with designers. I don’t know if you agree. Perhaps they’re still characters, just different, more low-key versions.
They all have that going on. Not everyone is so extreme, but when you look at Tom Ford, he absolutely has that. It’s very interesting because some designers, when you gather up the CFDA finalists or something, are striving for what they want to achieve. But they are sweeter now than maybe 20 or 30 years ago.
Perhaps they strive to be more relatable now. Thinking of the Vogue editors of those days who were such personalities, did you ever feel the need to adopt a persona? It’s something that comes up a lot with editors today with social media, this necessity to be visible and a personality.
I don’t think I ever needed to. But at Vogue, when I arrived, it was so intimidating. The fashion department was intimidating beyond because everyone was larger than life. I mean, Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, André Leon Talley, they had their roles, and it was really something to behold. We used to have meetings after the collections, and Anna would ask for opinions, and that was absolutely hysterical. [Laughs.] I remember one season, Candy Pratts Price said, “Butterflies! I see butterflies, I see them!” And she went on this mad spiel about butterflies. But you could see her point. [Laughs.] Those sorts of things were just divine.
I’d also be curious to hear your thoughts on the evolution of Vogue through the years.
Well, it’s changed fundamentally because the people who dominated the fashion scene here when I first arrived at the magazine were, well, terrifying. Over the years, that’s changed. You have people who can achieve their ends without being frightening, so it’s healthy to work, but it doesn’t keep you on your toes like you did before. That was quite something.
On that note, I would love to hear your thoughts about the evolution of writing about fashion. What was it like when you first started versus the launch of Style.com with timely reviews and eventually Vogue.com and Vogue Runway?
There were incredible writers like Joan Juliet Buck, who was sort of Anna’s age, and they were friends. She just had such a way with words, and I always revered her. She worked at British Vogue, and then she went on to become the editor in chief of Vogue France. But the pace of magazines then, it’s difficult to say now, was gentler because you were working on a monthly basis. This idea now that you go from one show to the other in the back of a cab and have to write and file by the end of the day is quite scary. You had Joan Juliet Buck’s large-scale stories, someone would go spend time with [Yves] Saint Laurent in Marrakech or Valentino [Garavani] in Rome, and it was a different sort of thing. But of course now you have the images coming through and you want to read about them immediately, so everyone has to work much harder.
Do you think we’ve lost something, or gained something, in that transition?
Well, you lose something. But you gain something too. You have to think in a speedy way. With a collection, you have to work out what the key points are quickly, and that’s quite a difficult feat as it is.
What do you make of the evolution of the runway shows? You wrote about this at length for our October issue. It’s interesting that the runway show is still a spectacle, but the clothes now are more commercial and streamlined. What do you make of this?
When I first went to Paris as a student, there were the most incredible designers like Thierry Mugler and the shows were a performance, really. I remember my first Mugler show, actually. He did it in this concert hall outside of Paris. He was selling tickets, so we were all absolutely excited about it. Everything was a spectacle. Pat Cleveland, a fabulous young model then, was eight months pregnant. She was Virgin Mary, and Stephen Jones made her hat. She came from the ceiling! At eight months pregnant, 50 feet from the ceiling. Imagine that.
John Galliano was a spectacle too. He created a storybook fairy tale, and his women and men had that feeling. They had to become the characters. It was incredible. And then Helmut Lang came along in the ’90s, and his women and men moved like gunfire, and they didn’t take off their coats or do a turn. It was a totally different way of doing things. Calvin [Klein] had seen a collection of his, and so American shows swiftly followed. Now we’re used to digesting these shows as a girl on the page with a full-length front view. You regret it sometimes. Those shows were fabulous. Christian Lacroix took 50 minutes to show his collection when he was doing couture. Saint Laurent took two hours. You were in this steaming-hot room—there was lots of fanning of programs—and it was special. When you go to a couture show, you want to have that experience. It’s a bit sad that they rush past you now because so much work goes into that. But people have to change. And if everyone is looking at that fine little image on the screen, it makes you think.
The idea of elegance, in fashion and as a person, has been bubbling up in my conversations. The definition of what’s elegant has changed over the years, perhaps due to our appetite for immediacy today, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.
When I started, elegance was something you would see in the couture shows. It was really special being there because otherwise you would get one or maybe two outfits in Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar. The general public wasn’t given access, so I suppose there was an elegance about that. I remember as a student at [Central] Saint Martins, there was a magazine published in Italy. I don’t remember the name, but it had these minute images of the shows with these little captions. That was the one place you could see how this designer was thinking. It was printed three months after the collections, and we got it a month after that.
Now, there are collections that are elegant, and there are people who are elegant. It’s a difficult thing. Elegance can be a young designer who is starting out, like that designer Standing Ground [Michael Stewart] in London. That was really elegant. And when I went to couture, you had these super elegant women like Betty Catroux and Catherine Deneuve and Paloma Picasso in the front rows. Tina Chow was exceptional. Now, it’s someone you probably don’t know who’s got that elegance. You just see them at the shows—they have it.
Is there a runway show that’s etched in your brain forever?
John Galliano’s [graduation] show at Saint Martins. It was about five minutes long, and he had been given the last slot of the day. So instead of the models everyone else had with the same makeup and everything, he had his own boys and girls. They were made up in a special way. That was the Les Incroyables show, and it was really astonishing, so that one I always remember. Then there was Christian Lacroix’s first collection in his own name and, actually, his last collection for Jean Patou. They were very remarkable. Some Saint Laurent couture things as well, and the Lee McQueen early shows were really electrified. They were so incredible. But there are always going to be remarkable people showing remarkable clothes. You just have to find them.
