“It was a wake-up call, definitely, that Hamish was interested in fashion,” Mrs. Bowles said.

Threads of all colors were not a passing fancy for Mr. Bowles, the dapper international editor at large for Vogue who has been tapped to fill the shoes (if not the billowing caftans) of André Leon Talley, the longtime columnist who left the magazine last February to edit Numero Russia.

“We wanted to fill that void with another compelling voice that could bring you into the world of fashion, travel and all the extraordinary places Hamish goes and all the people he sees,” said Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editor.

For the daylong celebration that Ms. Wintour arranged last June for Mr. Bowles’s 50th birthday, Ralph Lauren made a three-piece suit in sherbet pink, to which the guest of honor added an antique fob chain and a diamond and emerald Art Deco pin. “Long live the lilac queen,” the writer Christopher Mason toasted Mr. Bowles (known for his love of that color) in song, who can “find in piles of schlock, some Balenciaga frock.”

That is an understatement. If Mr. Talley was Vogue’s resident peacock, swooping about in capes and issuing edicts, Mr. Bowles is more its professor, with one of the largest private collections of vintage clothing in the world, which he stores in the Bronx and Queens. At the invitation of Oscar de la Renta, he curated the “Balenciaga in Spain” exhibition that showed in New York and San Francisco two years ago. He also curated “Jacqueline Kennedy and the White House Years” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2001. His new Vogue column began with a visit to Chatsworth, home of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire.

But Mr. Bowles has also displayed a comical side, reveling in unlikely immersive journalism like a stint at the Boulder Survival School, surfing with Blake Lively and, at the suggestion of Ms. Wintour, auditioning for “The X Factor.” (He has been known to sing Broadway show songs by heart at Marie’s Crisis in Greenwich Village.)

“Those experimental stories I have been given are coming from Anna and my fellow editors,” he said the other day, sitting in his chic, small East Village duplex, decorated by friends Roberto Peregalli and Laura Rimini, protégés of the Italian design master Lorenzo Mongiardino. “The ideas spring from their fiendish minds,” he said, only half-joking.

With his back to the double-height window in the living room, Mr. Bowles looked the perfect gentleman in a blue Dries Van Noten suit, a purple, magenta and lilac Charvet tie and loafers made for him “in a little cubbyhole in the medina in Tangiers,” he said, running his hand periodically through light brown hair and speaking in a British accent.

The living room was covered with pediment-topped bookcases crammed with works carefully organized into biographies, fashion and decorating. “We were going for something Proustian,” he said. “Upstairs, we wanted more of a Madeleine Castaing look,” he added, alluding to the French decorator famous for mixing French, Russian, British and junk pieces.

One might expect Mr. Bowles to be uncomfortable in any other world but that of the aristocratic grandeur he loves to study. But Ms. Wintour said that would be a misapprehension. “We have this vision of Hamish being this special person who lives in a special world, and he is not that at all,” she said. “He can be at home anywhere.”

An editor at a rival publication, who did not want to be identified commenting on the competition, suggested that giving Mr. Bowles wacky assignments has been a conscious strategy on Ms. Wintour’s part to make him more accessible. “His focus was too Mandarin,” the editor said. “I think Anna wanted to expand his brand to something more readers could relate to. If you are part of Twitter and the social media, you can’t be the person who can only talk about the French flea market.”

Mr. Bowles did not entirely disagree. “The new mandate brings a sense of range to what might have been perceived as a sequestered gilded Vogue life,” he said.

Yet Charlie Scheips, a former Condé Nast archivist who helped research photos for the Kennedy exhibition, believes that Mr. Bowles has “helped burnish Anna’s image, too,” he said. “His knowledge of fashion and the history of Vogue has been very good for her. She was mainly interested in contemporary fashion. She is not a fashion historian. I think he helped her realize that she was historically important.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/fashion/he-was-born-dandy.html?partner=rss&emc=rss