Who

Bowles is Vogue's European editor-at-large and the editor of Vogue Living.

Backstory

Growing up in North London, Bowles knew early on that he wasn't quite like other boys: an avid reader of Vogue, he collected antique purses and shoes, and vintage couture. "All I ever wanted to do," he says, "was go to costume museums." The eccentric teen came into his own at Saint Martin's School of Art, where he studied fashion design alongside John Galliano and hung out at New Romantic clubs. He was 19 when he won a competition to edit the teenage issue of Harper's & Queen and dropped out of college to work there, succeeding Amanda Harlech as junior fashion editor and rising to style director. After seven years at Harper's, in 1992 Anna Wintour hired him as American Vogue's living editor. Four years later he took over as European editor-at-large from André Leon Talley, and established a lifestyle of flitting around the world schmoozing with the wealthy and fabulous.

Of note

Bowles' role at Vogue encompasses everything from celebrity interviews to reporting from the Paris shows, but his specialty is lavish features on the homes of the ultra-privileged, such as the Schnabels' sprawling Hamptons house and the Ocampos' Argentine estate. His purview expanded in 2006 when Wintour put him in charge of Vogue Living, a shelter magazine under the Vogue umbrella. (For the time being, it's only being produced occasionally and distributed to existing Vogue subscribers.) During the brief moments Bowles is at 4 Times Square, he works out of an office overflowing with magazines and notebooks, the walls displaying a blown-up reproduction of a 1934 Cecil Beaton watercolor of Elsie de Wolfe and a paper collage portrait of himself swinging a quilted Chanel bag.

In October 2007 Bowles published a coffee table book, Vogue Living: Houses, Gardens, People, a look at 36 houses, gardens and their owners, including Madonna at her Wiltshire estate, Donatella Versace at Casa Casuarina in Miami, and Christian Louboutin's Egyptian houseboat.

On the side

His childhood passion for couture has led Bowles to accumulate a massive collection of vintage clothes housed in three cities—London, Paris, and New York—all tucked away in museum-quality, acid-free tissue paper and boxes. He lent dresses to the Cristobal Balenciaga retrospective at Paris's Musée de la Mode et du Textile and curated the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute's tribute to Jackie Kennedy.

Personal

A quintessential dandy, Bowles is hard to miss with his tailored suits, foppish hair and owl glasses. (He always makes a point to incorporate something purple into his outfit.) He splits his time between Paris and New York, where he lives in a 1,500-square-foot duplex on East 9th Street that he bought for $1.5 million in 2008; Chris Noth is a neighbor in the building. 

True story

When Bowles moved into his first New York apartment in the Village, he hung a newly acquired drawing of Truman Capote on the wall. He says that when his landlady dropped by, she informed him that Capote's boyfriend, Jack Dunphy, had once occupied the same apartment, that the picture had belonged to him, and that it had hung in the same spot.