I have a confession to make. In the beginning, I did not understand the Kate Moss phenomenon.
When I think of my childhood, I see my mother, the complete sixties parent, decked in purple frappe silk caftans, the acidic smell of newly stripped pine mingling with incense.
Lady Diana Spencer looked to relatively unknown designers - David and Elizabeth Emanuel, recently graduated from the Royal College of Art - when she wed Prince Charles in 1981.
I have Tom Ford, Gucci, Saint Laurent, McQueen, and odd pieces that I've just acquired because I happened to have come across them and felt they have some historical resonance.
As a boy soprano in the high school choir, I later sang a solo during the carol service at Canterbury Cathedral, but I was too young to secure the Freddy Eynsford-Hill role in our production of 'My Fair Lady' - and far too timid to have thought to audition for it.
I started looking at fashion magazines, specifically 'British Vogue.' I was reading a lot about Cecil Beaton. Then I thought maybe I should start collecting.
My obsession with accumulation, which at times has taken on the whisper of a psychic illness - as anyone who has experienced the ode to the Collyer brothers that is my 'Vogue' office will concur - began in infancy.
I don't have an off-duty wardrobe.
Actually, I had no idea what shooting hoops was or were. I thought dunking was something you did with a beignet and a cup of steaming coffee. I wasn't exactly sure what a Knick was.
The whole scale and scope of the decorating and fashion business in this country are incomparably grander than in London. What's thrilling about America in general, and the New York fashion scene in particular, is its optimism. It makes the whole experience energizing and uplifting.
My mother is the sort of woman who not only can raise a chicken and roast it to moist perfection but, as she proved to my openmouthed sister and me on a family holiday to Morocco when we were very young, can barter for one in a market, kill it, pluck it, and then cook it to perfection.
There are so many different criteria for my collecting, and I have to confess that the goalposts do shift. But obviously, with my background, I am particularly drawn to things that have been documented in contemporary magazines.
My interior is very, very dense - Proustian-looking, sort of Henry James. The walls are covered in pictures, and I transformed the big drawing room into a library lined with books.
After student years of flat-sharing and living with other people's taste, I went into decorating overdrive when I acquired my first apartment - its floor plan not much bigger than the vintage Hermes scarves I then wore side-knotted on my head, pirate-style.
Occasionally, I will come across something that has lost its label over the years - maybe the client didn't want to declare the dress at customs and took the label out - but I'll recognize it from an image that I've seen in Vogue, or a little thumbnail sketch.
This is how I started: My mom was crazy for antique shops and junk shops, and my sister and I would play this game where, if we were driving with my parents and saw a junk shop or an antique shop, we'd scream at the top of our lungs. My poor father would have heart failure and screech to a halt, and we'd leap out and go and explore.
Personally, of course it's exasperating when people think you're just swanning around in Europe, going to the occasional fashion show and then being glamorous at a party.
When I started in 1992, I really thought the 'Vogue' fashion department was one of the most frightening places on the planet.
I think there's much more fashion competition in the more junior levels of the fashion department. And that's exciting and stimulating to see, because it's 'Vogue;' it's great to see people dressed originally and with great style and panache. It wouldn't be 'Vogue' otherwise.
I was a fashion editor for years in London before I came to 'Vogue,' and I spent my life arranging the folds of a ball gown skirt for a picture and pinning fabric and using all those stylist tricks. And you don't have to do that now because they can do it in Photoshop.
