Hamish Bowles is not of the opinion that fashion is best appreciated on a short-term memory. For more than 30 years, the British style maharishi and longtime European editor at large at American Vogue has been amassing one of the richest and rarest collections of couture on the planet. He started as a child in London, picking up costume pieces from thrift stores—a compulsion that quickly turned into pure obsession by the time he studied fashion at Central Saint Martins College. His various jobs at top-tier fashion magazines hasn’t helped things either. His trove ranges from the 1850s all the way to last season, with heavy doses of Balenciaga, Galanos, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and a number of rare-bird couturiers you’ve probably never heard of. Today, a vast majority of Bowles’s boon—upward of 2,000 pieces—is housed in a storage unit in Long Island City, New York, where the collector can be found giddily digging through racks of Montanas, Molyneuxs, and Malandrinos, wearing white gloves and gasping in delight at his own finds. He’s currently at work organizing, documenting, and cataloging the entire collection, with plans to one day create his own foundation.In the meantime, Bowles remains ever busy curating costume shows in his mind. Designer and amateur couture collector Narciso Rodriguez stopped by the storage unit to get a frock tour like no other.
Narciso Rodriguez: That was an inspiring afternoon.
Hamish Bowles: That’s nice to hear. It’s so exciting, having a designer come to see the collection. What was intriguing for me was when you looked at something like that purple gazar on the ’67 Givenchy dress—not the overdress, which is the statement,just the infrastructure. I could see you working it out in your mind.
NR: It’s just meticulous. It’s so clean and well thought out. It was not meant to be seen, ever.
HB: The infrastructures of so many of those clothes are extraordinary. It’s not just mid-century couture, which you imagine is going to have some unbelievable armature within it to create its shape and silhouette. It’s even there in an ’80s Geoffrey Beene dress or a ’60s Galanos . . . the kind of dresses that women would buy off the peg in chic department stores across America. The construction and interior lives of those clothes is breathtaking.
NR: What’s the earliest piece in your collection?
HB: It’s a bodice. The label is Worth & Bobergh. [Otto] Bobergh was Charles Frederick Worth’s partner, but only for the first two years of Worth’s business, from, I believe, 1858 to 1860. Princess Metternich, who was the wife of the Austrian ambassador to Napoleon III’s court, soon discovered Worth. She was a woman of hideous aspect, but she was extraordinarily chic, and her clothes attracted the attention of Empress Eugénie. Worth then became Eugénie’s dressmaker, and in a sense, the official of court couture. I was thrilled to discover it. It’s not a particularly sensational piece in itself, but you could absolutely imagine it in one of those daguerreotype calling-card portraits of Princess Metternich. It really is a piece that is resonant of the history of couture, because Worth was the first couturier in the modern sense. Before that there were great dressmakers—Rose Bertin dressed Marie-Antoinette, and Leroy dressed Josephine, and then Palmyre was a great 1840s dressmaker. But in that period, women would go to choose their fabrics at the fabric supplier and then choose their trimming somewhere else and the dressmaker would put it all together with them. Worth went in with his vision and said, “I see you as a Renaissance princess in chartreuse velvet and purple neon damask, and that’s what you’re wearing.” So that is kind of the scintillating birth of couture. That’s the oldest piece I have, and I’m so excited to have it just for thatresonance.
NR: What is the latest piece that you’ve collected?
HB: 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. A case in point that I’ll never forget is this Catherine Malandrino dress. After 9/11, at the first party that people actually felt that they could go to, all the women were wearing Catherine Malandrino’s American Flag dress.
NR: Oh, that’s great.
HB: It was such a defining moment. I just happened to come across one of those dresses in an Upper East Side thrift store recently. I acquired it because it encapsulated a very precise moment. Actually, I have some other patriotic dresses. I have a red, white, and blue piqué Fourth of July evening dress that Trigère made in the mid-’60s. Basically, I am acquiring things for the exhibition in my head. I am thinking, Well, this would be a great dialogue with that.
NR: What you’ve done is beautiful because it’s your vision, what you react to, but you also have incredible fashion moments that have a place in history—like the Christian Lacroix hand-painted and beaded lycra catsuit that Jerry Hall wore on her 30th birthday.
HB: 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. I have pieces from the ’20s through today that Vogue has photographed or illustrated, whether it’s a 1926 Chanel dress that is the same as one photographed by Steichen on Ina Claire, or a ’94 Galliano that was photographed by Irving Penn on Kate Moss, or the ’95 white satin Calvin Klein sheath that Steven Meisel photographed on Kristen McMenamy. That piece, of course, had resonance with you, Narciso, because you were in Calvin’s design studio when it was conceived. So, obviously it’s very potent to have a dress that the fashion editors of the day felt worthy of record. A great example is the Yves Saint Laurent Spring-Summer ’69 couture patchwork skirt with the organza blouse. It was photographed by Hiro for Harper’s Bazaar, by Penn for American Vogue, and was ordered by the Duchess of Windsor. It also helps that I spent so much time in the Vogue archives, so I know those images back to front through the decades. That research does also help in the sleuthing, which is, of course, a collector’s thrill. Occasionally I will come across something that has lost its label over the years—maybe the client didn’t want to declare the dress at customs and took the label out—but I’ll recognize it from an image that I’ve seen in Vogue, or a little thumbnail sketch.
NR: It’s astounding that you know the name of every piece, where you got it, and how you got it. There’s a great story attached to everything.
HB: The story can be so much the exciting part of the whole process. There are designers who I absolutely love. I really love Jacques Fath. Before our meeting today I spent the morning with Bettina Graziani, who was Fath’s muse in the late ’40s and early ’50s. There’s an iconic Henry Clarke picture of her where she’s wearing this white satin Saharienne jacket, very tightly belted. She said, “That was a man’s army shirt that Jacques brought back from a trip to New York. I remember him in the studio wearing the shirt himself and belting it really, really tight, and sort of saying, ‘Let’s do this in satin.’”
NR: How brilliant.
HB: I have a variant of that piece that was made for Princess Liliane of Belgium, who was a woman of impeccable chic and glamour. She had her own intervention in the process, because she used to collect exotic Indian and Far Eastern brocades, often metallic brocades, and this is a fabric which she might have presented to him to have made into a variant of that white satin jacket . . . So you see, I have the entire history of that piece!
NR: Your collection also gives the opportunity to see how designers constructed dresses in such radically diverse ways.
HB: Yes, and it’s very important how you experience them. Pieces of Balenciaga’s that looked a little dowdy in the hand, the moment you put them on a mannequin they absolutely come to life because his cutting was so subtle. You think of his clothes being very austere and hieratic and forbidding, but actually they can be extraordinarily sensual and sensuous and sexy. Those pieces that look like nothing suddenly drape over the body or stand away from the body and form these unimagined shapes. They are extremely sculptural. They can be very different depending upon the angle, whereas with a designer like Dior, the clothes are designed to have dramatic impact when the woman walks in or out of the room—they are not so much considered in the round. They are constructed in a completely different way.
NR: But you don’t only collect the hits. You have some rather less well-known designers lurking in the closet.
HB: There were designers who I think are really unsung, whom I am personally a champion of. I am absolutely crazy about Mainbocher’s clothes. I think they are so subtle, the detailing is so extraordinary, and they are so unbelievably evocative of such a particular time and place and milieu and lifestyle, of absolute subtle luxury. Even his work from when he had his couture salon in Paris through the ’30s—it has a kind of brisk edge to it and a crispness and a precision that is completely American. You canreally see why a client like Wallis Windsor would have been drawn to his clothes, and why she became so emblematic of his work. It needs a café-societyclient who really understands Europe but has a kind of brisk, no-nonsense American edge. I also really love Captain Molyneux, who trained with Lucille and dressed all of Noël Coward’s leading ladies. They always used to say that Mainbocher made you look like a lady and Molyneux made it look as though your mother might have been a lady, too.
NR: That’s brilliant.
HB: Molyneux was the designer whom Dior most admired.
NR: Really? I didn’t know that.
HB: His legacy is astonishing. His private life was extremely colorful. But he wasn’t really able to parlay it into his legend the way that someone like Chanel might have done more easily. I think he had affairs with Raymond Navarro and Harold Nicolson . . . I mean, an extraordinarily eclectic crew! His salons were all gray, which is something that Dior was to absorb and reinterpret in his own salons. The salon was all wall-gray, head to toe. The dress boxes were gray, wrapped up in gray tissue paper. The chauffeurs wore gray. The delivery carts were gray. It was a foil to all the colors of the clothes.
NR: I could have stayed looking at the pieces in your storage unit for hours. Your eye just moves from a Gaultier embroidery to a Lacroix embroidery to a Montana embroidery . . . It’s so rich.
HB: I know. I open the door to that storage warehouse unit and sort of think, What have I done?
NR: I know how passionate you are about fashion. I’m passionate about my work, and I collect, but that’s a supercollection. I don’t know anyone who does supercollecting.
HB: It’s sort of maniacal, isn’t it?
NR: It’s power shopping.
HB: It’s the country house I should have had.
NR: It’s better than the country house. Definitely more entertaining. How did you fall into this trap of collecting?
HB: 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. This is when I was a child. I would buy little pieces that I was drawn to. It might be, like, an 1860s guinea purse, or a Victorian gentleman’s needlepoint slippers, or ’20s gold dancing shoes.
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I'll be looking forward to his witty reviews for vogue.com.
