Hamish Bowles Quotes

I lived in South America when I was growing up. I spent hours sketching. I was good at drawing, and I was obsessed with fashion, but I was also obsessed with magazines.

My mentor in college was Stephen Shore. I loved his color palettes and his taking mundane things but finding them fascinating.

I'm lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don't want a Picasso on my wall; it's great art, but it's dead art to me. I'd rather have a photograph by someone I've never heard of that really inspires me.

I'm constantly exposing myself to art and that inspires me.

I've loved art for more than 30 years.

I'm sort of like Jean-Paul Goude, the graphic designer who used to style Grace Jones and shoot all her visuals, just meaning that I use all mediums in one - music, fashion, and art. I'm hitting it from all angles.

The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me.

I love art; I collect mostly modern art.

I love the art world, I love art galleries, I love what it means - I love art.

If I see something that inspires me, I'll dress like it.

My inspirations come from everywhere. It's important to look at everything and anything. I think what I create is serious fashion, but I don't want to keep my focus on that. You have to look at a lot of different things. I mean, people are always surprised when they find out that my favorite show is 'RuPaul's Drag Race.'

I'm an artist, and I love the visual. Fashion is high art sometimes and hack work other times, but it's something worthy of study and love.

As an art person, I think all television changed me a lot.

I go to contemporary galleries all around the world when I can. There's always something historical and something contemporary; those are my rock references.

I have an art-school background, not a fashion background where it's like, 'Oh, we're going on holiday to Miami.'

My fascination with women's clothes began very early. My mother was a very fashionable woman. She also made her own clothes. She had these fashion magazines, and I would draw the women in them. My middle school art teacher suggested that I have a fashion drawing show.

Most of the songs I write are full of power, and I'm suspecting it may come from my love for grotesque Renaissance art and the Eurovision Song Contest.

I felt like I grew up with Bowie. I never dressed like him, even though I did love the music, but consistently throughout my career he has been a go-to reference point: The suit from 'Young Americans,' or the gold Missoni-type looks of Ziggy Stardust. 'The Berlin Years' still influences me.

The New York world is definitely geared toward fashion. So many people work in the fashion industry, photography, all sorts of satellite businesses that have to do with it, so there's no way that it can't affect you, and it just kind of makes you think with more of a fashion edge.

I believe that the source of your inspiration is very important. I sometimes see this problem with photographers, even very good ones, who have drawn too much inspiration from photography and who, over time, have a problem forming their own identity.

I think what inspires me is in a constant state of flux...it's easier to stick to photographers and perhaps cinematographers, though the great medieval, Mannerist, and Baroque painters of Italian, Spanish, Flemish, and German origin are a constant source of inspiration, along with select modernists like Dali.

I could never before say that I loved color or that I understood color. But Oscar de la Renta opened up a side of my brain.

My parents never mentioned anything about fashion in our household, instead we used to talk about literature, theatre, and arts...this is why I have kept a real relation with the Art world, by putting books from the beginning in my shops' windows.

I didn't see painters doing paintings of glassware and glass shelves or sand dunes and receding snow fences. Why does that interest photographers and not artists?

My introduction to photography and a lot of how I developed aesthetically was through '50s and early-'60s fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.