The Longest Journey

In 2022 a stroke brought Hamish Bowless teeming life to a crashing halt. After months spent in the hospital and a year back at home, he reflects on just how far hes come.

Life was very crowded in late October 2022. I had managed to meet a tight deadline to finalize the catalog accompanying “India in Fashion,” an exhibition that I curated celebrating the lure that

the country has had on Western designers from Charles Frederick Worth to Alexander McQueen, and the glorious explosion that it has seen in recent years from its own artisans and designers. (It was the culmination of a three-year project, which survived the COVID-19 pandemic and ultimately opened—in glittering style—at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in late March 2023.)

In other cultural asides, I was swept up in La Bohème at the Royal Opera House and relished my second foray into Only an Octave Apart at Wilton’s Music Hall with moving and hilarious performances by Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo and costume design by JW Anderson (in case you were wondering what the couple were doing in dresses resembling small cars). It was my second viewing of the performance and, being a sold-out show, the seats we were given were split between two in the front—which I gave to my guests, Mario Testino and his partner, Jan Olesen—and one in the back, where I sat in solitary, isolated splendor.

Memorably that same week, I was a guest of Kim Jones and Dior on a transporting tour to Sussex—in the shadow of the Bloomsbury set (Charleston, Virginia Woolf ’s Monk’s House, and the marvelous Berwick Church)—and I ended the month with meetings at World of Interiors and putting the finishing touches on the forthcoming “India in Fashion” exhibition.