Inside a Magazine Editor's New York Apartment Filled With Wonderful Objects | Vogue

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. 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. 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 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 partly explains the chaos that you see before you. My great friends Laura Sartori Rimini and Roberto Perigali of this practice, Studio Perigali, 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 taste. One of the amazing things that they did was to create this trompe l'oeil. So it looks like the full door and they put the hinges here, but this is like a trick of the eye because 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 amusing because guests come and you can see they're 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 Harper's 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, 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, to 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, it's just so adorable. They're in kind of wedding finery. And then this guy and his jalaba. 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 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 drawings and photography the people who shaped style and fashion through his lifetime. I had like a VW camper van holiday with my dad going all around Britain. I remember that I 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 lives that they seem to have led and these magical environments they created and the way they dressed and so on. So that's a book that is always with me. Actually, it's not The Glass of Fashion, it's The Dust Jacket, The 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 Hamish Bowles' New York volume is going to be. 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 this 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 St. 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 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 preternaturally smooth, pulled face. And he said, his first words to me were, don't be alarmed, young man. I've had so many liftings. 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, he'd have a rolled up copy of Vogue or Harper's Bazaar. And he'd say, come on, boys, up and at them. 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, Fagerstrom 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 bat wing sleeve. You can see it's sort of got this standalone hourglass shape. And in fact, another irony of Bunny Roger's 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 clothes that they were wearing were inspired by these great kind of forward-thinking queer guys. And it became a symbol of, you know, heteronormative 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 Noel Coward. And they were by Gladys Coulthrop, Noel Coward's set designer. Through the years, Noel's become a kind of repository for hats. It seemed like a good idea when you just have one sort of graceful hat on. But as you can see, they've 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. 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 one, 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 Piana brushed cotton, actually, is what the fabric is. And of course, it's purple, such an underrated, undervalued color, but not by me. Oh, my God. So these curtains, this is this fabric by this amazing French company, Tassinari de Châtel, originally woven for Marie Antoinette, of course, found by me in all unlikely things, a place called the Curtain Exchange in London. A fraction of the Marie Antoinette price, I'm sure, even in 1788. Very happy to have those. And of course, the colors just work so perfectly with everything we've 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 in the Dodecanese in Greece that they've been trying to get me to go to for years and years. There was a little shop there. And this woman had sold kind of dishes and jugs, I think, made and painted by her father. And every time I went, I would buy something. I really love them. And now that I go back, the father or the grandfather who was making this pottery is no more. And there's no one who has the skill to make them or 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 in 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 trim and 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 trim and capote. And so it was my first really significant purchase. And I brought it home. I didn't have a hammer and I didn't have a nail. 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 didn't know what she meant. And 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 had 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 and all the walls in New York. The picture had come back to that. I really thought, oh God, Truman Capote is going to look after me in New York. And he sort of has for 30 years. This definitely gets the priority shipment treatment. So these have been some of my objects of affection. Thank you for joining me and indulging me. And now I've got to continue packing post-its on priority objects that are going straight to London.