i'm so impressed by anyone who can live
in a kind of
sensory deprivation tank i think it
looks staggeringly chic and i'm so
admiring as you can see
that's not my approach
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hello vogue i'm hamish bowles i'm the
editor-in-chief of the world of
interiors and global editor-at-large for
american vogue at home in new york city
and today i'm going to show you some of
my favorite things
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i found this apartment 14 years ago i
think it had been lived in by quite a
celebrated literary editor and after 30
years in the city i'm i'm moving i'm the
new editor-in-chief of the world of
interiors magazine so i'm going to be
moving back to the city of my birth and
rediscovering it anew and that's partly
explains the chaos that you see before
you my great friends
uh laura sartori rimini and roberto
pedigali of this practice studio
paragali they offered their services and
said you know it could be a kind of
calling card for their work in america
and so
we worked together and it was just such
an extraordinary experience because they
know me so well you know i've got very
strong tastes
one of the amazing things that they did
was to create this trump lawyer so it
looks like the full door and they put
the hinges here but this is like a trick
of the eye because all all this is a
structural column actually the door
is here
kind of then you sort of disappear into
the bathroom here
it's very amazing because guests come
and they you can see them just fiddling
with this handle and not knowing why
they can't open the door you know
something we were kind of forced to do
by the planners but it's become i think
my kind of favorite little detail
in an apartment that's full of wonderful
details
in 1989 i was the fashion director at a
magazine called harpers and queen in
london and part of that was going to
tangier in morocco and began this total
total primal love affair that i had with
the city of tangier and as you fly in
you can see troughs and slopes of all
these surrounding hills and kind of
incredible
uncharted
land about an hour outside the city to
raise funds for the local communities
that kind of kids and young people in
the community start making dolls in the
way that their parents and grandparents
had done them you know like this woven
straw horseman who i just think is so
adorable and he's been given really
impressive pecs
and
over here these kind of dolls there she
is in her kind of verbal woman hat i
mean she's just so adorable
they're in kind of wedding finery
and then this guy in his jalava i just
couldn't resist them and every time i
look at them i'm kind of taken back to
rahuna which is this really
kind of magical place high on a hill
looking down over this
the sweeping hillside to the beach and
the endless atlantic beyond really a
magical place
as a a child of i think eight i found a
copy of cecil beaton's book the glass of
fashion which was really
him kind of talking about
and illustrating with with drawings and
photography
the
people who shaped
style and
fashion
through his lifetime i had like a
vw campervan holiday with my dad going
all around britain and i remember that
i've sort of stayed up all through the
night with like a torch
reading this book and being so
fascinated by these people of style and
all these extraordinary lies that they
seem to have led in these magical
environments they created in the way
they dressed and soul so that's a book
that is always with me
actually
it's not it's not closer fashion it's
the dust jacket for glass of fashion
because clearly i've taken the book out
and i wanted to preserve the dust jacket
which just shows you how often i
reference the book this is cecil
beaton's
new york
which is a wonderful kind of snapshot of
the city in the early 1930s when he kind
of came and he was so excited by its
possibilities social and sexual on so
many different kind of levels and it's
fascinating seeing his stylist's eye
it's rather bittersweet looking at cecil
beaton's
new york because i wonder what amish
bowles's new york volume is going to be
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i love sort of associating objects that
have a kind of aesthetic connection i'm
looking for things that have
consistent threads where
designers maybe from very different
generations eras decades are looking at
the same kind of inspiration and
interpreting it in different ways so i
was very excited when i saw that justin
vivian bond was doing the series of
eyes of
sort of queer icons in a way and so i'm
delighted to have cecil beaton's eye
as a student at martin's school of art
my first assignment was to interview the
honourable neil roger who was known as
bunny to his friends he was a kind of
legendary british
dandy i went to visit him at home in
holland park he had this amazing
double-fronted white gesso
mansion
and he
i went up the steps a little
trepidatious very nervous about my first
interview
and
he opened the door he had a i'll never
forget it he had a sort of scarlet
turtleneck that showed off his very
lithe
figure he was very proud that he had the
same waist measurement as the princess
of wales and a very pretty naturally
smooth pooled face and he said those
first words to me were don't be alarmed
young man i've had so many lifting so
i'm the only man in london who has to
shave behind his ears here he is giving
you full late 30s
sort of gender fluid realness i would
say you know when i see this picture i
see someone who was kind of very at ease
with their sexuality
what's so interesting is the parallel
text that the honourable neil roger was
also a decorated war hero was in charge
of a regiment during the second world
war and he showed incredible bravery his
battle cry
to rouse the troops saying he'd have a
rolled-up copy of vogue or harper's
bazaar and he'd say come on boys up and
atom you know you're looking at an image
of a kind of effeminate man here but
there's this sort of backbone of
scottish metal and steel and grit
one of the things that i was focused on
were his clothes which had largely been
made by a tailor called watson
phagostrom and hughes i brought this one
out just so you can kind of get a sense
of when you wear it there's really this
kind of curve into the waist and the
sleeve almost becomes like a batwing
sleeve you can see it's sort of got this
standalone hourglass
shape and in fact another irony of bunny
rogers style is that he
developed this kind of neo-edwardian
throwback look
and a lot of kind of bachelor gents in
britain in the 1940s kind of went for
this
retro look but then it was taken up by
like the teddy boys and rockabilly
culture
and
you know little did they know that the
the clothes that they were wearing were
inspired by these great kind of
forward-thinking queer guys
um
and it became a symbol of you know
heteronormative um
menswear in the 50s
so i think i was quite an unusual little
boy i suppose my twin childhood heroes
were
not the soccer stars of the day but i
was obsessed with cecil beaton and with
noel coward who was a playwright and a
songwriter also a diarist and a novelist
i adored his music i loved his plays so
i was very excited when some things came
up that had belonged to elizabeth welch
who was a fantastic singer who had this
bust of no account and they were by
gladys kolkrop nell coward's set
designer through the years knoll's
become a kind of repository for hats it
seemed like a good idea when he just had
one sort of graceful hat on but as you
can see it kind of accumulated through
the years i sort of tend to bring
hats back from most of my travels so
noel's now a little bit overburdened
with hats but
there's nowhere else to put them
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so this was a treasured find
and it's cecil's sketch for the costume
maker for one of the ladies
leaving covent garden in the opening
scene act scene one of my fair lady
you know you might think that the walls
are kind of dense with pictures but
they're a great deal more in storage or
stacked up occasionally i bring them out
and sort of recycle and re-hang
against this laura piano brushed
cotton actually is what the fabric is
and of course it's purple such an under
rated undervalued color but not by me
oh my god so these curtains this is this
fabric by this amazing
french company tassinari the chatel
originally woven for mario antoinette
course found by me
of all unlikely things a place called
the curtain exchange
a fraction of the mary antoinette price
i'm sure even in
1788 very happy to have those and of
course the colors just worked so
perfectly with everything we chosen for
this room one of those happy
synchronicities and you know more purple
and lilac i think now about 15 or 16
years ago i finally went with friends to
an island um
in the dodecanese in greece that they'd
been trying to get me to go to for years
and years there was a little
shop there and this woman had um sold
kind of um dishes and
jugs
i think made and painted by her
father and every time i went i would i
would buy something i really loved them
and now that i go back the father or the
grandfather was making
this pottery
is no more and there's no one who has
the skill to make them all the knowledge
so they're kind of even more precious in
a way
so this picture is quite the story when
i first moved to new york which was
1992 30 years ago of course i found this
incredible
parlor floor on
13th street
between
6th and 7th and a wonderful kind of
1850s brownstone
and there was
absolutely nothing in it except for a
lamp
and
a nail in the wall literally
and then
there was a sale of
some things that belonged to jack dunphy
who was a lover of
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truman capote and there was this
drawing
which i recognized it's by rene boucher
who was a sort of fashionable artist who
did a lot of
fashion studies for vogue and portraits
for vogue
i loved his work and obviously i was
totally obsessed with truman capote and
so it was my first
really significant purchase and i i
brought it home
i didn't have a hammer and i didn't have
a nail but there was this nail in the
wall and so i hung the portrait there
my landlady came up and she looked at
the picture on the wall and she said
that's strange why would jack have left
that picture i don't know what she meant
i said what do you mean
and she said this very nice man called
jack lived in this apartment for 30
years
and he had that picture hanging on that
nail it'd have been jack dunphy's
apartment i had no idea when i'd taken
the lease this of course was his picture
and it was hanging where i
hung it
all the nails in all the walls in new
york
the picture had come back to that and i
really thought oh god truman capote is
going to look after me in new york and
he sort of has for 30 years so
this definitely gets the priority
shipment treatment
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so these have been some of my objects of
affection thank you for joining me and
indulging me and now i've gotta
continue packing post-its on priority
objects that are going straight to
london
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do
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you