Hamish Bowles Quotes
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Possessions. The very word is potent - suggestive as it is of ownership both material and erotic. To possess. Possession. Possessed.
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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.
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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.
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As a boy soprano in the high school choir, I later sang a solo during the carol service at Canterbury Cathedral, but I was too young to secure the Freddy Eynsford-Hill role in our production of 'My Fair Lady' - and far too timid to have thought to audition for it.
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I have Tom Ford, Gucci, Saint Laurent, McQueen, and odd pieces that I've just acquired because I happened to have come across them and felt they have some historical resonance.
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My tastes formed quite early. All I ever wanted to do was go to costume museums.
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I found myself at dusk in the bewitching Roman city of Jerash with H.M. Queen Rania of Jordan one year, and scrambling with hardened paparazzi to get an image of the Princess of Wales in a tiny Nepalese clinic in the foothills of the Himalayas another.
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In the face of postwar austerity, hundreds of brides-to-be across the country sent Princess Elizabeth their clothing coupons so that she could have the dress of their dreams.
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My interior is very, very dense - Proustian-looking, sort of Henry James. The walls are covered in pictures, and I transformed the big drawing room into a library lined with books.
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What an electric thrill it sends up and down the spine, how it sets the heart racing: A Royal Romance! A Royal Wedding! The pomp and the pageantry!
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In the midst of applying for American citizenship, of finally attempting to get my presidents in a row, I felt it incumbent upon myself to explore the national psyche in every way.
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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.
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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.
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When I was 14, I entered British Vogue's annual talent contest and got a special mention. I went up to London to meet the editors and wrote about it in my high school magazine.
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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.
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Lady Diana Spencer looked to relatively unknown designers - David and Elizabeth Emanuel, recently graduated from the Royal College of Art - when she wed Prince Charles in 1981.
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I started collecting couture when I was about 10 or 11 years old, and the very first piece I bought was a Balenciaga suit from 1962.
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I have a confession to make. In the beginning, I did not understand the Kate Moss phenomenon.
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I started looking at fashion magazines, specifically 'British Vogue.' I was reading a lot about Cecil Beaton. Then I thought maybe I should start collecting.
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Six feet three in her stocking feet, L'Wren Scott was every inch a great lady.
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Singing for me has always been a joyous but private pleasure that connects me in a lyric thread to my beloved grandmother Alice.
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Actually, I had no idea what shooting hoops was or were. I thought dunking was something you did with a beignet and a cup of steaming coffee. I wasn't exactly sure what a Knick was.
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The whole scale and scope of the decorating and fashion business in this country are incomparably grander than in London. What's thrilling about America in general, and the New York fashion scene in particular, is its optimism. It makes the whole experience energizing and uplifting.
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I kind of miss the hatchet days of Mr. Fairchild at 'WWD', when they really took no prisoners and there was sort of outrageous favoritism and its inverse.