COLIN'S
COLUMN
How Very Hamish
Colin McDowell talks to Hamish Bowles about his love
of fashion, Anna Wintour, American Vogue and the exhibition he has curated at
England’s historic Chatsworth House.
BY COLIN
MCDOWELL
APRIL 7,
2017 19:44
LONDON,
United Kingdom — There are very few journalists one can imagine being given the
run of Chatsworth House, one of Britain’s most stately homes, owned by the Duke
and Duchess of Devonshire. But that is exactly where Hamish Bowles has been
working on and off over the last six years, spending weekends exploring the
sartorial heritage of the storied Derbyshire estate, its inhabitants and their
guests, whenever his day job as American Vogue’s international editor-at-large
permitted. The result is the exhibition “House Style: Five Centuries of Fashion
at Chatsworth.”
That Hamish
was asked to help curate the show underscores not only his knowledge, but his
charm. And if I tell you that his friendship with the Duke and Duchess’
daughter-in-law, the Countess of Burlington, goes back a long way and survived
a slightly rocky start you will begin to understand why he has been so admired
and appreciated not only as a fashion advisor but also an amazing weekend house
guest.
Their
collaboration was memorable for both of them. He trussed Laura Roundell, as she
was known before her marriage, in a very tight wasp-waist corset in which she
was expected to sit stock still on a high stool to be photographed. Almost
inevitably, she fainted. Hamish administered the standard English cure for such
a moment: a cup of tea and a biscuit. A bond has existed between them ever
since.
Hamish’s
weekends at Chatsworth revealed the immense range of unique clothing hidden
away for safe keeping in the various rooms and attics of the immense house.
Hamish was in paroxisms of delight at each new discovery as the clothes began
to amass. Many of the finds were sealed in boxes hundreds of years ago and
included clothes by Givenchy and Dior. Add to that the dresses given to Stella
Tennant — the model and the granddaughter of Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of
Devonshire and Deborah Mitford — by grateful designers for whom she walked and
you have an amazing centuries-long reflection of a family, including Georgiana,
who was played by Kiera Knightly in the 2008 film The Duchess; Adele Astaire,
sister of Fred Astair; and John F Kennedy's sister Kathleen, always known as
Kick, who married Billy Cavendish who was killed in World War II in 1944.
But Hamish
was brought up far from the glamour of aristocratic life in Hampstead, an area
of north London that was comfortably middle class and rather left wing. His
father was Vice Provost of University College, London; his mother was
especially interested in photography and antiques. In the words of her son, she
was a “deeply intrepid maverick and adventurer” and the family ethos “was
distinctly left of centre.” Not perhaps a typical training ground for a future
fashion connoisseur and collector.
A former
neighbour was a costume academic and she vividly remembers how a young Hamish
would show her the things he had bought with his pocket money at charity shops
and antique fairs: old lace, Victorian velvet ribbon, pins and dried flowers.
She also recalls him appearing in her kitchen one morning with a strange object
on his head. It was a dish cloth that he had worn — and arranged just so
—having seen a drawing of a fontange, improvised by a future mistress of Louis
XIV during a hunt at Versailles. Hamish — he thinks he was possibly nine at the
time — needed to be assured that he had copied the design correctly. It was
possibly the first manifestation of his need for perfect correctness.
Indeed,
even before his tenth birthday, it was clear that Hamish Bowles was a very
unusual little boy, which is why his neighbour gave him the little silhouette
cut-out paper doll in period costume that he still has today. As he blithely
admits, “I don't think I've ever thrown away anything to do with dress, fashion
and interior decorating. Ever! Like the Cavendishes at Chatsworth!”
My work has
a lot to do with getting out and about and not being constrained by being in an
office.
By the time
he was 14, Hamish Bowles knew precisely what he wished his future to be. He
entered the British Vogue Talent Contest and he won a special mention. “That
was the turning point,” his mother claims. But talking to Hamish, I got the
strong impression that it was all part of a master plan hatched much earlier.
He went on to study fashion journalism at Saint Martin's School of Art (now
Central Saint Martins). And this is when his good luck clicked in. “I’ve only
had 2 jobs in my life,” Hamish explains. “The first was at Harper’s & Queen
and I joined as junior fashion editor replacing Amanda Harlech when she left to
go full time with John Galliano.”
It was a
remarkable experience. “Harper’s & Queen did a teenage shoot every few
years, and when I was on my foundation course at Saint Martins I applied, as it
were, and they gave me the men’s pages to do. I was assigned to work with Mario
Testino who was a young up-and-coming photographer about town, more or less
just arrived from Peru and already making a name for himself. We had a lot of
mutual friends socially so that was the beginning of our great friendship.
"My
fashion editor was Vanessa de Lisle. She terrified me, but I have a lot to
thank her for,” recalls Hamish. “She had seen what I had done with the menswear
pages and she gave me the womenswear pages to do as well. I did a story based
on the film 'The Women' — Stephen Jones did all the hats and there were all
these veiled 1940s concoctions and Anthony Price suits and things.
"Vanessa
arrived in the middle of the sitting and didn’t think this related to the
teenage debutante story she was expecting. So she got the hairdresser to do a
kind of ‘hair in the electric socket style,’ wildly back-combed and teased. It
couldn't have been more unlike my original concept. It was my first
introduction to the fact that you have to stand up for your idea otherwise it’s
going to get trampled underfoot. Anyway, it was a success in that it introduced
me to Harper's, and although I stayed on at Saint Martins to study fashion they
kept asking me back to do freelance things." Ultimately, Hamish ended up
as the fashion style director of Harper's.
Then Anna
Wintour came knocking. “She said: ‘I see you really like interiors and
decorating, why don’t you come and write about it for Vogue?’ I had a lot of
friends in New York at that point, because I was there all the time on shoots,
and I was certainly fascinated by her. I had gone in for a very unsuccessful
interview at Vogue when she was editor-in-chief. I’d put all my previous
fantastical shoots in there and she looked at two pages and closed the book
with great finality. And then changed the subject by asking what I was reading.
We had a very engaging chat. I was more than a little intimidated and I did not
get the job. Then she called me up. ‘Hi, this is Anna Wintour,’ she says. The
Harper’s & Queen offices were open plan so telephone calls were
excruciating. This was even worse because in a Hearst office I was taking a
phone call from the boss at Vogue. I went white with terror.”
Eventually,
Hamish began doing a few fashion shoots for American Vogue. “I always
understood who the Harper’s & Queen reader was and the parameters of what I
could do. I initiated ideas, I chose the clothes,” recalls Hamish. “But
suddenly at Vogue there was a very, very different hierarchy where the
editor-in-chief is connected and concerned about every aspect — about every
caption, every pair of earrings, every model! It was a steep learning curve and
I was happy at that point to move into the world of interiors and lifestyle and
art, where there was more personal freedom.
My role now
is being Hamish for Vogue. I think there is a certain amount of an
ambassadorial thing in it.
“My role
now is being Hamish for Vogue. I think there is a certain amount of an
ambassadorial thing in it,” he explains. “Now that Condé Nast is amplifying in
all kinds of ways, I'm also more informally involved in Architectural Digest
and all sorts of things across the brand platforms. And we are doing a lot of
thinking outside the box, like consultancy. I'm going to different kinds of
areas like film and obviously the website. So my role is very exciting.”
Indeed,
Hamish has developed into the sort of creative polymath. “Obviously it's
extremely unusual and exceptional that I would be given permission to work on
something as time-consuming as the Chatsworth project, although, one of the
reasons it's taken so long to bring to fruition is that it's been literally
weekends in between being in Europe for the collections,” he says. “In the last
10 days of preparing the exhibition I had to write my May cover girl story for
Vogue. I did five pieces for the website and two frontal books stories. It's
the joy of the laptop and intermittent signals in a way that things can be a
movable feast. I mean it's a miracle to live in the stage where you can
literally be on a Greek Island and sending in copy. As a largely peripatetic
worker, I think that what I do for the stories and generate for the magazine
has a lot to do with getting out and about and not being constrained by being
in an office.
“When we
did Vogue Living, I was immensely hands on and doing a lot of the stories
myself. Styling and writing and so on. Generating things, as well as matching
creative types together to produce their own things,” says Hamish. “I also do
these insane 'fish out of the water person' stories which began first about five
or six years ago when we were doing a great American outdoors issue and some
wag at the office thought that it would be an amazing idea to take me on an
outdoor survival course in sunny Utah — grizzly bear country.
"I did
it. And I did survive; I was quite proud of myself. But unfortunately the
result of the story was that it was such a huge success and a hoot of laughter
for everyone that they've done nothing but invent fiendish scenarios for me
since. So I went to learn how to play basketball with the New York Knicks and
soccer with the American Olympic women's team,” he laughs. “I think Anna is
determined to 'man me up' somehow. Not entirely successfully, but she has
brought out hidden qualities in me. And I think what gave me more courage than
anything was auditioning for ‘X-Factor.’ That is by far the most frightening
thing she's sort of blindly signed me up for.”
On Wintour,
Hamish is clear: “I think Anna is a profoundly inspirational figure in a sense
that she juggles all the worlds the magazine touches. She is extremely involved
in the political scene. She has been an amazing fundraiser; plus breast cancer
awareness, teenage anxiety. HIV/AIDS from the very beginning and she’s a great
ambassador and fundraiser and profile raiser for the British theatre in
America… It's working out how to mesh and link those things together that
maximises the impact for her and the Vogue brand.”
Hamish is a
collector of fashion and is working on plans to display his trove of garments.
“My next extramural but related project would be to focus on my own collection
and get that out there. It goes back to Charles Frederick Worth, who I think is
the father of fashion design, imposing a vision on a customer rather than the
other way around.”
His
collection goes right up to autumn/winter 2017. “My very latest acquisition is
one of those leaves of paper dresses by Christopher Kane, the pink one, it was
one of those pieces that gave me goosebumps when it came down the runway
because I just thought, 'You know, I've seen his technique.' I have a Jean
Desses dress that has a similar thing and Valentino has done it because of
course he worked with Desses. But I'd never seen it used in this way. Such
discoveries are electrifying when you have a sense of fashion construction
history. Seeing a designer taking something which is familiar and doing
something unfamiliar with it. Those are the great moments.
"The
very latest thing I bought — and I'm speaking literally as of today — is a
Paquin cape, trimmed with embroidery. A total dream. When I first saw it I was
just in tears… Mine is not an immense immense immense collection. I think it's
between 3500 and 4000 pieces. Quite a lot to choose from for an exhibition.
I’ve also frequently been told to do a book and we have one in the works.”
Such
discoveries are electrifying: seeing a designer taking something which is
familiar and doing something unfamiliar with it.
But despite
his extracurricular activities, Hamish is still a key figure at American Vogue
to such an extent that he is often referred to as “Hamish Vogue.” As Wintour
told The New York Times, “he brings to the magazine a compelling voice that
brings the reader into the world of fashion, travel and all the extraordinary
places Hamish goes and all the people he sees.”
Larger than
life characters are usually showbiz constructs. But Hamish is a natural. As we
said goodbye, I asked him where he was going next. "To Huntsman,"
(his Savile Row tailor). "They have designed a special Hamish tweed for me
and I can't wait to see how it looks made up."
How very
Hamish — and how perfectly right for the man who has reinvented the concept of
the fashionable dandy with conviction, courage and chutzpah.
