Hamish Bowles

I think there's much more fashion competition in the more junior levels of the fashion department. And that's exciting and stimulating to see, because it's 'Vogue;' it's great to see people dressed originally and with great style and panache. It wouldn't be 'Vogue' otherwise.

When I started in 1992, I really thought the 'Vogue' fashion department was one of the most frightening places on the planet.

I have a confession to make. In the beginning, I did not understand the Kate Moss phenomenon.

For reasons that baffle me still, my high school sports coaches put me in the first division of the rugby, cricket, and soccer teams.

As a boy soprano in the high school choir, I later sang a solo during the carol service at Canterbury Cathedral, but I was too young to secure the Freddy Eynsford-Hill role in our production of 'My Fair Lady' - and far too timid to have thought to audition for it.

We're obviously in a strange environment where practically anyone can set themselves up as a pundit of sorts. It's all about sorting the wheat from the chaff, and I'm very interested in reading different points of view, and certainly different generations than my own that have such a very different world view.

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.

What an electric thrill it sends up and down the spine, how it sets the heart racing: A Royal Romance! A Royal Wedding! The pomp and the pageantry!

I kind of miss the hatchet days of Mr. Fairchild at 'WWD', when they really took no prisoners and there was sort of outrageous favoritism and its inverse.

Personally, of course it's exasperating when people think you're just swanning around in Europe, going to the occasional fashion show and then being glamorous at a party.

The whole scale and scope of the decorating and fashion business in this country are incomparably grander than in London. What's thrilling about America in general, and the New York fashion scene in particular, is its optimism. It makes the whole experience energizing and uplifting.

I was a fashion editor for years in London before I came to 'Vogue,' and I spent my life arranging the folds of a ball gown skirt for a picture and pinning fabric and using all those stylist tricks. And you don't have to do that now because they can do it in Photoshop.