October 29, 2006
Possessed
A Grown-Up Wizard’s Tale
David Coleman
Any adult who has accompanied a child down the weird, wonderful path of Harry Potter may have smiled indulgently at the concept of a parallel universe, filled with sorcerers and mythic beasties, occupying the same space as our own, yet in a completely different dimension. The idea!
But what are lifestyle magazines if not fairy tales for grown-ups? They do tell of a beauteous world where legendary creatures magically transcend the natural laws of weight gain and credit card limits. The new Vogue Living, a shelter-style supplement to the mother ship that may yet be published on its own, is a pinnacle of this form. In the first edition, just out, a bevy of enchanted princesses of the moment (Amanda Brooks, Samantha Boardman Rosen, Aerin Lauder) loll fetchingly in their respective pleasure domes.
The magazine is the work of the fashion world’s own Harry Potter, Hamish Bowles, who, like that boy wizard, knew from childhood that he was different. “My tastes formed quite early,” said Mr. Bowles, who grew up in North London. “All I ever wanted to do was go to costume museums.” When he was not shopping for antique clothing or being ferried around to museums by his patient father, his nose was buried in the fantastic society tales of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh.
And just as young Potter receives messages via supernatural couriers, Mr. Bowles had no sooner arrived in New York in 1992 to work at Vogue than his dream to join this fabulous world was affirmed from the beyond.
While he was hunting for an apartment, he bought a very flattering charcoal drawing of Truman Capote by the midcentury illustrator René Robert Bouché at a Sotheby’s auction. When he finally found an apartment in a brownstone on a leafy Greenwich Village street, he moved in with a bed, two chairs and the drawing.
“I didn’t have a hammer or a nail,” Mr. Bowles said. “So I hung it on one of the two nails that were already there next to the fireplace."
A few days later, when his landlady dropped in to say hello, she stopped short and stared at the wall. “She almost leapt out of her skin,” Mr. Bowles said. When he asked what was the matter, she said, “Well, you know this was Jack Dunphy’s apartment” — Mr. Dunphy was Capote’s longtime boyfriend — “and that was Jack’s picture, and that was where that picture was always hung.”
Mr. Bowles may have an encyclopedic mind for beau monde details, but this he did not know. “It was the most breathtaking coincidence,” he said. “It really seemed to confirm that I was meant to be in this environment. He was like a guardian angel for my new life.
“It was very much that idea of having your fantasy and realizing it.”
But while Mr. Bowles, who now lives Uptown, loves the idea of the charmed and swell-elegant life the drawing suggests (it adorned the first-edition book jacket of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), the kiss it bestowed on him was not just one of luck or longing. His heroes may have been society swells, but they were also people, like Capote or Cecil Beaton or even Holly Golightly, who came from modest circumstances and made something fantastic of themselves. Beaton, he said, always exaggerated his humble beginnings.
“He had the drive that people who he admired didn’t, because they didn’t need it,” Mr. Bowles said. “He made it happen.”
It is a good thing to remember about the world of grown-up magic. It’s not something you have; it’s something you make.
nytimes.com