In my years at Vogue I have been sent on some thrilling, surreal, magical assignments. I found myself at dusk in the bewitching Roman city of Jerash with H.M. Queen Rania of Jordan one year, and scrambling with hardened paparazzi to get an image of the Princess of Wales in a tiny Nepalese clinic in the foothills of the Himalayas another. I have found myself in a dahabiyeh on the Nile and on a frisky stallion on an Argentine estancia. In a sixteenth-century fortress in Jaipur as fireworks heralded the new year, and in a private mah-jongg salon in a villa in the jungled hills of Hong Kong.

But never in all my born days (as my grandmother would have put it) did I imagine that I would be dispatched, in a spirit that I can only describe as facetious, to partake in a course program of the Boulder Outdoor Survival School in deepest southern Utah.

“I Will Survive” (Up Front), in November’s Vogue, charts my odyssey far, far from any recognizable comfort zone. Read it and weep.

Click below for a gallery of Hamish’s personal photos from his trip into the wild:

Continue reading ›

The fantasy continues at Buckingham Palace, which to my eternal delight is opened to the great unwashed every summer whilst H.M. Queen Elizabeth is enjoying the bracing Scottish air at Balmoral.

John Nash’s outrageously theatrical scheme for the state rooms, executed for George IV (who as prince regent was, of course, responsible for the giddily improbable delights of the Brighton Royal Pavilion), transformed the palace from a surprisingly modest country house in the city to an appropriately majestic setting for a king who understood pomp, circumstance, and the bravura gesture. And who not only commissioned exquisite objects and furnishings himself but also cannily managed to accumulate some of the loveliest porcelains and meubles from the French royal family when their treasures came on to the market in the untimely estate sale of the eighteenth century. Nash’s enfilades of rooms and the paintings and objets contained within can never underwhelm, but the palace’s annual exhibitions always add to the delight. This year, the sixtieth anniversary of the formation of the modern Commonwealth, sees a celebration of the queen’s adventures overseas, with a captivating display of clothing worn and gifts received. The variety of taste exhibited in the respective nation’s choice of gift occasionally gives one pause. Here are diamond brooches fashioned in the image of national flowers and indigenous artifacts—didgeridoos and Maori kiwi feather capes—alongside the positively surreal (a gold scale model of an oil derrick, Saskatchewan?). Continue reading ›

On the eve of a holiday trip to Greece I raced to London’s National Theatre for Nicholas Hytner’s acclaimed production of Racine’s Phèdre, in the transportingly beautiful and poetic translation by Ted Hughes.

I last saw this play (in a different translation) in the 1984 Glasgow Citizens Theatre production, with Glenda Jackson an incendiary Phèdra in a production directed by David MacDonald and designed by the inspired Philip Prowse in baroque Racine-era costume.

For Hytner, Bob Crowley’s designs weave ancient and modern elements in a seamless and persuasive whole. Crowley’s set—a conjunction of rock and travertine and a powerfully blue sky—transports one effectively to Troezen and in fact made me count the hours to my arrival in Patmos.

In the title role, the nonpareil Helen Mirren is nothing short of hypnotic. Her deft reading of Hughes’s magnificent words blends stentorian tradition with urgent modernity in ways that electrify and disarm. (I remember Jackson was more declamatory, in the Racine manner.) Mirren’s Phèdre is by turns seductive, imperious, exultant, distraught, powerful, impotent; she is truly a force of nature. A goddess for all ages.

For my money, Dominic Cooper (whom you will recall as the love interests in The Duchess and Mamma Mia!) has a more effective stage than screen presence, and as Hippolytus his thoughtful muscularity convinces one that he would besot his mercurial stepmother and enflame Aricia (the beguiling Ruth Negga). Margaret Tyzack as Oenone, Phèdre’s loyal attendant and ultimately, cruelly, her scapegoat, is the sort of character actress who can make the hairs stand and quiver with the crease of her brow. Magisterial. After two hours I was wrung dry. And not a little unnerved about what Greece might have in store for me.

Arriving in Athens I sped, breathless with anticipation, to the New Acropolis Museum, opened to great fanfare as a venue in which to display the treasures of the Parthenon complex.

Anyone who has had occasion to pass through the more recently created duty-free halls of Charles de Gaulle will be all too familiar with the vernacular that Bernard Tschumi, working with the Greek architect Michael Photiadis, has chosen to showcase these breath-snatchingly beautiful masterpieces of Greek art.
The third-floor Parthenon Gallery, which displays the friezes and metopes, is the most effective, with its simple presentation of these glories and its panoramic windows linking these elements to the thrilling city beyond.

Below this Tschumi has furnished a glass floor that must have seemed, on paper and in model, an ode to the city’s luminous light. It is, however, alarming to walk upon but doubtless will provide pubescent boys with the thrill of looking directly up ladies’ skirts, which is the inevitable if unserene view from below. The lascivious depictions of Bacchus nearby must be highly amused.

The sculptures and artifacts in the Archaic Gallery are a wonder to behold—especially the reassembled fragments of the pediments, and the various statues of korai (Athena’s handmaidens), many still miraculously bearing traces in sanguine and black of the complex embellishments to their elaborately draped robes. Unfortunately these elements are crowded into the open-plan spaces in a manner that must have a method but seems haphazard. There is little sense of progression, and one is left fretting that a great treasure has been overlooked in the necessary zigzagging through the objects. This is a sadness, as there is really nothing here that should be overlooked. Among the treasures of singular and bewitching beauty are a marble bust of a bearded king of the Bosporus Kingdom (150–125 b.c.), and the votive eyes—like an eighteenth-century Venetian half-mask—of an offering to the Sanctuary of Asclepios (350–300 b.c.), an exquisite piece displayed placed in the rough-hewn stone column for which it was originally intended. Unimaginably beautiful, disquieting, and timeless.

—Hamish Bowles

In the fullness of time, and specifically of Vogue’s November issue, you will appreciate, dear readers, why I have been so neglectful of my Hamishsphere world this past week or so.

Let me just say that you simply will not believe the assignment Vogue has just sent me on. . .

England was at its loveliest when I took off for Spoonbed Farm, on the Hilles estate of Detmar Blow. With views down one of the Cotswolds’ Golden Valleys, this eighteenth-century stone farmhouse is one of my most beloved places on Earth. The buddleia was bristling with Red Admiral butterflies, and master milliner Stephen Jones had arranged nosegays of flowers around the house as prettily as you could imagine.

In the plunging valley beyond is the Arcadia of the Painswick Rococo Gardens. These were landscaped in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, with vistas leading the eye to distant prospects of classical and Gothic pavilions and follies. The Victorians shrouded the land in a dense arboretum, and by the 1970s the eighteenth-century scheme was choked beneath dense woodland and undergrowth.

Happily, the discovery of a watercolor rendering painted in 1748 by Thomas Robins, a local Cotswold artist, revealed the wonders of the original scheme. Robins recorded a bird’s-eye view of the gardens and its enchanting structures, and from this it has been possible to re-create the original intent, restoring the ruinous pavilions that existed and re-creating others long vanished—as well as the kitchen and flower gardens that served and delighted the early Georgians.

The result is bewitching.

One of the most delightful structures is the prettily gothicized Red House, which has two angled facades so that it provides twin eye-catchers. It appears first at the end of a woodland path, and its second facade is revealed commanding a gentle vale.

A Gothic Exedra provides a linchpin for a radial arrangement of vegetable and flower gardens and recalls the fantastical structures invented by Felix Kelly, the artist who specialized in architectural capriccios, imagined or based on existing structures, and whose scheme for neoclassical pilasters and detailing transformed Prince Charles’s Highgrove from a rather dour Georgian cube to an appropriately stately palazzetto. Continue reading ›

The weekend was spent chez Jane Stubbs in her rambling barn conversion in rural Upstate New York. Jane, as you all know, has the bookstore of the same name on Bergdorf’s seventh floor wherein she sells every style-related vintage tome that every self-respecting style meister needs to stock their brimming shelves. Jane’s own library, naturally, is a dream. It sprawls from the room designated for that purpose and, that room proving woefully insufficient to the task, onto floor-to-soaring-ceiling bookcases in the living room, too. One could and does spend hours in slow perusal. However, the promise of antiques beckoned, and we trawled the streets of Hudson, New York and Great Barrington, Massachusetts in quest of treasures (wild success all around, from antique marble sinks to the splendidly named slag ware, swirls of purple and mauve art glass, manufactured in Pittsburgh at the turn of the century and collected, obsessively, by Pittsburgh native Andy Warhol—from whose collection my new pieces came). On Sunday afternoon we sped through the rolling Berkshires heading for the Mount (edithwharton.org), the house that Edith Wharton built for herself in 1902 in a bower of deep-green woodland and forest. Those funereal pines have since grown tall enough to mask what must then have been magisterial views to distant lakes and hills, but the gardens have been carefully restored to evoke Wharton’s whimsical and appealing mix of Franco-Italian elements, controlled ferny woodland, and deliriously planted Edwardian flower borders. The house itself is a classical Belle Epoque interpretation of Louis Seize and neoclassical Italian taste, as espoused by Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr. in their 1897 The Decoration of Houses, their groundbreaking challenge to claustrophobic High Victorian decorating. Alas, Wharton’s elegant furnishings have long since been dispersed, but as part of the challenging ongoing fund-raising mission for the ravishing house, Mmes Bunny Williams and Charlotte Moss have been instrumental in orchestrating the rooms as a show house. Next year sees a “Salute to French Design” —an appropriate theme in this house created by a woman with such pronounced Francophile tastes. We were just in time for highly civilized cocktails on the terrace, with musical accompaniment from a classical guitarist, a charming evocation of the lives of leisured but productive refinement lived in this uniquely seductive manse that Wharton herself considered a masterwork. “Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than novelist,” wrote Wharton playfully to her lover Morton Fullerton, “and this place, every line of which is my own work, far surpasses The House of Mirth. . . .”

One lives in hope that some literary-minded philanthropist will rise to the challenge of securing this wonderfully evocative place, a unique testament to one of America’s greatest writers, for the nation. It is heartbreaking to think its future is still so unsettled, despite the scrupulous restoration efforts already completed.

Lovely though some of this week’s haute couture offerings have proved, the most ravishing clothes of the week were to be found at the Les Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre in the exhibition celebrating the singular vision, artistry, and brilliance of the very great pre-war couturiere Madeleine Vionnet. Curator Pamela Golbin took me round on Thursday morning and explained the theory and technique of the dresses (the vast majority from Vionnet’s own archives; she gave the museum 122 garments in the early fifties, as well as 750 patterns and nearly 13,000 photographs of her garments). Golbin tells me that every costume conservator in the land was at work on this project for the last year and that she developed a new dry-cleaning technique; most of the clothes look as fresh as though they had been newly delivered from Vionnet’s grand showplace, a palatial townhouse at 50, Avenue Montaigne. A vendeuse often had to accompany the clothes, to explain to the ladies’ maids how the dresses—which seem simple but are often complex—needed to be draped and fastened. It took Azzedine Alaïa four hours to work out how one particularly perplexing ivory goddess gown from 1935 was correctly draped. (It was worth the effort; it is a dream of beauty.) Two rare models from 1912 were breathtaking in their modernity, but Vionnet really came into her own when she relaunched her house in 1918, having closed it during World War I.  Vionnet, who didn’t draw, draped each model on a little wooden artist’s mannequin (seen in the show), working exclusively with pattern pieces based on a circle, square, or rectangle— or combinations of all three. She used the bias cut for outer garments (an innovation; it was a technique that had previously only been used for underwear), and the practical application of her methods is revealed in the video monitors that show the original photographs of the garments, which Vionnet had taken to copyright her designs (she was a fighter for intellectual-property rights on fashion and “signed” her labels with her inked thumbprint). Many of the models from her cabine have figures that to our modern eye seem lumpen and ungainly, Belle Époque bodies without corsets. But the original dresses seen in these photos fit Golbin’s svelte mannequin forms perfectly—a tribute to the elasticity of Vionnet’s dressmaking technique. Alber Elbaz—one of any number of fashion designers who have been dazzled by this show—told Golbin that he felt heavier designers especially focused on creating the lightest, most unencumbering clothing possible. Vionnet, who was comely herself, made dresses that are light as thistledown. She hated the fact that she had no neck and worshipped her South American clients, with their swanlike necks and pert backsides; the fabulously beautiful Argentinian Mme Martinez de Hoz—Dulce—became her emblematic thirties client, just as the smoky eyed Countess de Gramont had been in the twenties. Vionnet built a state-of-the-art atelier for her staff of 1,200 behind her palatial Avenue Montaigne store, complete with maternity rooms, but this was demolished, and the magnificent salon where her unparalleled clothes were presented to clients—designed in 1923 by Georges de Feure and absolutely intact —was destroyed as recently as 1990, surely an act of criminal desecration? Continue reading ›

I awoke at Hanham to find myself in a place of unparalleled romance surrounded by one of the loveliest and most imaginative gardens in England. Which is, let’s face it, saying something. You will recall that Julian and Isabel Bannerman have worked on the wondrous walled gardens at Houghton (Vogue, December 2003) and of course on sundry follies and stumperies at Prince Charles’s Highgrove. They have recently opened Hanham’s gardens to the public, and how vaut le voyage it is (www.hanhamcourt.co.uk). We had lunch in a rustic log cabin they have built on a hillside that affords a bird’s-eye view through the orchard to the wonderfully rambling house and its attached church (it was part of the fifteenth-century Keynsham Abbey complex, although the tithe barn is eleventh-century) and of the scented gardens in all their blowsy July glory. It was a perfect wrench to leave, but the evening promised a concert by the Voce Chamber Choir at Grosvenor Chapel. My Franco-English trip has been bracketed by delightful musical diversions; the balmy evening I arrived in Paris I went to Zarzuelas pour les Enfants, an enchanting evening of these plangent Spanish songs by composers such as Vives and Torroba (with a dash of Bizet’s Carmen and Offenbach’s Les Brigands thrown in) arranged by Vincent Simonet and directed by the beauteous fashion muse Agathe Borne at - and to support - the Institute National des Jeunes Aveugles on the Boulevard des Invalides, a vast and handsome 1840s building. In addition to being one of the most attractive men in fashion (he is, among other things, Paolo Roversi’s agent), Vincent proves to be possessed of a lovely tenor voice. Who knew? Well apparently many who have been on Roversi shoots and been serenaded with Lully and Mozart. Back in London on my last night the musical delights continued. The Voce Chamber Choir was founded by the glamorous and engaging Susan Digby (Lady Eatwell) with Harry Briggs in 2003. Lady E promised an “Entente Musicale” during which one could compare French and English choral traditions, from the 16th century Clément Janequin and William Byrd to the 20th century’s Darius Milhaud and Benjamin Britten. Many of the pieces were a revelation—Thomas Weelkes’s “Laboravi in Gemitu Meo”; Henry Purcell’s “Hear My Prayer, O Lord”; Ernest Chausson’s “Ballade”; and Benjamin Britten’s “The Evening Primrose” were especially beautiful to my mind tho there were no disappointments (Voce will be performing the same program at Saint-Agrève on July 18 if you happen to be in the Ardèche). The music is appropriately celestial ands the singers, all amateurs, remarkable. Lady Eatwell is working on an exciting new project, to be directed, as it happens, by the excrutiatingly talented Patrick Kinmonth. Isn’t it a small world?

Jasper Conran’s fiftieth birthday was a glorious celebration of Englishness. Even the weather performed. To whit; the heavens opened, and the military band who greeted us with a stirring rendition of “Land of Hope and Glory” wore their dashing foul-weather capes but played valiantly on beneath the lashing rains. Jasper had seemed perfectly ensconced at Flemings Hall (Vogue, September 2005), a gloriously atmospheric Tudor house that had once belonged to the Surrealist photographer Angus McBean and positively reeked of Miss Marple. However, he clearly relishes a project, has moved on, and is now grandly established at Ven House, a simply exquisite William and Mary house of perfection unparalleled in the Somerset countryside. I don’t know where to begin. Jasper’s Jacobean portraits are now joined by eighteenth-century pictures by Devis and Reynolds and their ilk. The state beds and handsome Kentian furnishings are arranged with academic precision. The celery-green damask in the stately garden gallery had just been installed with gilded fillets but looks as though an early Georgian had hung it 300 years ago. There is a bewitching orangery (added by Decimus Burton in the early nineteenth century) with tree ferns of such antiquity they touch the ceilings, and the gardens have been superbly laid out in the formal tradition with box parterres and pleached allées. The whole thing is an essay in perfection and a hymn to Jasper’s assured eye and taste - as were the dinner and entertainments, arranged in a marquee of Edwardian opulence, trimmed with garlands of black-and-white ticking stripes and hung with scarlet chandeliers. It looked like somewhere the Ascot racegoers of My Fair Lady might have repaired for strawberries and cream. Vast urns of lavender hydrangea were placed at the entrance to the awning that guided us in.

Inside, tables had enchanting cloudy mounds of soft pink cabbage roses, peonies, and sweet peas and were named for icons of British taste. Jasper’s table was H.M. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. I was at Cecil Beaton, naturally. Others were named for Kathleen Ferrier, Duncan Grant, Constance Spry, Margaret Rutherford, Bea Lillie, Oliver Messel, Norah Lindsay, Joyce Grenfell, et al. Dinner started with a pea-and-mint mousse and moved on to crab served in scallop shells, and then shellfish platters opulently spilling with lobster, langoustines, and oysters. Jasper bade his guests wear white (I did tropical black tie), so the room was a glory. Molly Dineen wore the frothy tulle gown that Jasper had designed for her wedding; Lucy Ferry wore the alluring thirties dress she donned to wed Robin Birley. Amanda Harlech wore flawless frosted white satin by Chanel couture. Georgina Godley wore shorts, and Victoria Fernandez rocked the dance floor with her gymnastic Colombian dance moves in movie-star Halston jersey and fox. Lady Conran’s daughter wore an all-white Native American Indian ensemble, while her son came in tennis whites. A jazz band set the tempo. Patrick Kinmonth gave the toast, surely the wittiest and most elegant I have heard. (“The Obamas are in the White House and Jasper is in the right house,” it began in “All’s well with the world fashion ” “ . . . Ven, like Jasper, is a Baroque masterpiece. . . .” He ended by announcing the launch of JaspAir, and gave an exceedingly droll rift on the imaginary in-flight announcements (“in the unlikely event of an emergency a little black dress will drop from the ceiling above you . . . tie in a double bow at the side . . . do not inflate your bra before you leave the aircraft . . .”) We were all very, very amused. Waiters in black tie spun around the dance floor on roller skates and family members entertained with a Joyce Grenfell monologue. We then repaired to the terrace and spine-chillingly wondrous fireworks set to Handel’s “Zadok the Priest” before returning for strawberry ices, chocolate cake and deejaying by Gaz, the eponymous owner of a nightclub that was the place to see and be seen in the early eighties. It brought one’s misspent youth flashing back. And somehow it was four in the morning, and a charabanc arrived to take sundry happy guests to Hanham Court, the Bannermans’ fabled house twixt Bath and Bristol. Dawn was breaking as we arrived, and I collapsed into a bed spread with Edwardian linen printed with wisteria. Bliss.

As the last spiny “ruffled” jet opera coat swept the runway of Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli’s enchanting Valentino show (leaving a trail of jet quills in its wake), an optimistic note was sounded for a Couture Week that has seemed at times elegaic and even funereal (well, there were a lot of black clothes, and the Valentino show was even inspired by the Ascot races of 1910 ,when everyone dressed in mourning for Edward VII) as designers struggle to make luxury alluring and subtle in challenging economic times.

Great seductions have included Alexis Mabille’s wrist-to-elbow bracelet of bowed rhinestone ribbons; the saucy fifties corsetry and underwear peeping through Galliano’s mid-century couture statements at Dior; Bruno Frisoni’s feathered evening purse for Vivier, with a clasp that makes two gilded lovebirds kiss when it snaps shut; and the House of Margiela’s white leather gilet decorated with rows of false eyelashes and its impasto eighties jackets that turn out to have been embroidered with shards of car headlights in amber, red, and green. Lacroix’s poignant show was an exercise in beautifully restrained elegance, and Gaultier evoked the sirens of the silver screen for his homage to Hollywood spectacular. There was magic in the fine-jewelry showrooms, too. Marc Newson’s collaboration with Boucheron produced a breathtaking necklace of myriad sapphires and diamonds forming a Milky Way of starbursts in a midnight sky. Marc told me it was inspired by the Mandelbrot set and fractal theory and constructed to an extraordinarily detailed mathematical formula. Who knew? Whatever; however he got there, it looked a perfect dream, a rêve (and took 2,000 hours to construct). And it was celebrated with high jinks at the Boucheron store last night, with gaming tables on the second floor and guests placing their bids with lavender chips bearing Bs. Now, if they don’t have my name all over them, I don’t know what does. Nearby at Chanel, a model of the Place Vendôme (seen in all its limestone loveliness through high eighteenth-century windows) had been painstakingly constructed from giant crystal Lego-like pieces (above). The crystal stopper of the iconic Chanel perfume bottles, which you will recall is a rectangle with canted corners, is based on the plan of the Place. I confess I knew it not. Deco diamond starbursts were nestled in the rooftops. It was dazzling. So, too, were the royal couples that Victoire de Castellane invented for her magical jewel sets for Dior—pendants depicting kings with memento mori hard-stone skull heads, their crowns, ruffs, and chains of office a-sparkle with diamonds cut every which way. Their queens were the en suite rings. Ravishing. At Fabergé, designer Frédéric Zaavy created windblown rose and peony blooms of thousands of tiny color-shaded stones, with fire opals and moonstones suggesting dewdrops. Exquisite. Continue reading ›

Last night BAM screened Luchino Visconti’s sublime 1963 epic The Leopard, based on Lampedusa’s elegiac novel. At 185 minutes it was still 20 minutes short of the director’s cut that won the Palme d’Or, but still so much more impactful than the bowdlerized version that 20th Century Fox originally released. It is without question in my pantheon of most beloved movies, and after three hours, as Burt Lancaster’s (career-defining) Prince Salina totters into the darkling Sicilian streets like a wounded lion, I was only left yearning for more.

Nino Rota’s hypnotic music sweeps one along, Giuseppe Rotunno’s majestic cinematography snatches the breath away, but Visconti’s longtime costume designer, the peerless Piero Tosi, carries all before him. On a giant screen such as the Rose Theater’s, the detailing is astonishing. Quite simply, Tosi is the very best in the business, and his work with Tirelli, the famed Roman costume workshop, is unmatched. The patrician Visconti (on whom Lancaster based his characterization) apparently locked Tosi up until he produced several different ideas for each of the key costumes that prove so defining. The director’s maniacal obsession with period detail means that his impeccable evocation of 1860 Italy is as persuasive today as it was over 45 years ago. Claudia Cardinale is at her most superb as Angelica Sedara, the beauteous, lowborn temptress whose vulgarian father slowly usurps the power of Salina’s princely clan. The scene where she is introduced to the Salinas, who have been mocking her father’s pretensions and garb, and have no expectations for her, is one of the movie’s electric moments. She appears in all her crinolined beauty and, anxiously biting her ample lips, takes their breath away—as she does ours. Small wonder that the prince’s beloved nephew, played by the equally breathtaking Alain Delon, spurns his aristocratic cousin to marry her instead, changing the status quo forever. For the famed ballroom scene that seems almost to be shot in real time, Tosi dresses Cardinale in beribboned white ruffles out of Winterhalter so that her image leaps from the crowded room. Here she gives us a sense of the impact that the fabled Italian beauty the Countess Castiglione might have had on Second Empire Paris. Cardinale’s purse was apparently stuffed with an unseen embroidered handkerchief of the period—a characteristically fanatical Viscontian touch. (He also insisted that the drawers in Gustav von Aschenbach’s bedroom commode in Death in Venice be filled with historically correct underwear that viewers would never see, reasoning that he and Dirk Bogarde, who played the tormented composer with such memorable poignancy, would know.)

Tosi is apparently leery of travel, which is perhaps why he has never brought his brilliance to Hollywood, where Milena Canonero flies the flag for superb historic detailing. Nevertheless, in his nearly three-decades-long collaboration with Visconti—think of Senso, Death in Venice, The Damned, Ludwig, The Innocent—he has set the bar for historical evocation in the movies. He is a towering genius.