Interview

NR: Do you still have those things?

HB: I do, yes. I have all those things. I have great problems deaccessioning anything of mine! [laughs] Not necessarily a good thing. I went to the theater and to the ballet all of the time with my parents, and I loved costume. I would go to the costume court at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dr. Ann Saunders, then the secretary of the Costume Society of Great Britain, could see that I was interested in these things, and she would give me these costume-through-the-ages coloring books. So I became more and more interested and started collecting much more seriously. Then we moved to the country, but I would come back to London every other weekend and I’d go to Portobello Road and to the jumble stores and thrift stores. I was really collecting costumes. So it was much more 18th- and 19th-century up to the ’20s, really. It was the time of all these great nostalgia movies like The GreatGatsby [1974] and The Boy Friend [1971] and Murder on the Orient Express [1974]. So those were the sort ofaesthetic keystones. Then on the cusp of my teens, I started reading British Vogue. That was a very, very intoxicating time for an impressionable infant to be looking at Vogue, because it was the moment when Grace Coddington was doing those extraordinary photo-essays with [David] Bailey and Barry Lategan and [Lord] Snowden . . . The clothes were by Bill Gibb and Ossie Clark, Zandra Rhodes and John Bates. It was an exciting, stimulating time in British fashion, and the clothes had a lot of nostalgia to them and a lot of fantasy. They were all things that turned me on. I sort of made a conscious decision to start collecting fashion history and make it morespecifically designer-oriented. There was a kind of charity jumble sale, like a charity bazaar, at Sadler’s Wells, which is a theater company in London. I suppose the ladies on the board of Sadler’s Wells had given their clothes. I found a 1962 Balenciaga suit that belonged to Lady Scott, and it cost 50 pence, which was my weekly pocket money. I’ll never forget. So I bought it. They did an auction for this Balenciaga bolero that was garnet silk velvet with black frogging and piping and had sequins on it so it really looked like a matador jacket. It was so Balenciaga and so Spanish. Of course, I really, really, really wanted it, but it went for 60 pounds, which was 120 weeks’ pocket money, so that wasn’t really an option. But the incredible thing, which is where the dementia of collectors creeps in, is the triumphs that one has in life. That auction was in 1976. And about six years ago I was in a vintage store in Los Angeles, and there was that same jacket.

NR: Unbelievable.

HB: Without a label! But I absolutely remembered it from 1976. I bought it. Actually, since then, I found this marvelous Louise Dahl-Wolfe color photograph of it in Harper’s Bazaar from 1946. So everything comes to you eventually. You just have to wait.

NR: So from that auction in 1976 you started to go crazy?

HB: Completely. That was a time when you could really go to stores and jumble sales and you would find things that no one wanted . . . Certainly no one wanted London couture from the ’30s and ’50s—you know, Norman Hartnell and Hardy Amies, who made dresses for the queen. Those clothes really conjure up the kind of lifestyle where the London designers were making town-and-country tweed suits that you could wear for lunch at the Ritz and to Goodwood races, and then they made ball gowns, and there was very little in between. That was an English woman’s wardrobe then. I have lots of those town-and-country suits from every single London couturier who was ever in the equivalent of a CFDA [Council of Fashion Designers of America]. Then it just grew and grew. I’d buy things when I could afford them. Christie’s South Kensington had costume and textile sales every Tuesday afternoon at two o’clock, which was exactly the time I wassupposed to be having my French lessons. So my French really suffered because I always had a terrible headache, but somehow I managed to find myself on the opposite side of town, turning dresses inside out.