OVER 21 MAGAZINE - 1980
Kim Bowen went to the Paris prêt-à-porter collections last year with some others fashion students from St. Martin´s and became the talk of the town. The market people outside their hotel went wild for her. At the Claude Montana show, the word´s photographers line up and took pictures of her. Italian Vogue snapped her at the latest boite, the Bains-Douches. And when she walked into the usually implacably piss-elegant Café de Flore: ´´It was really exciting. Everyone just stood up and roared and clapped. It was real queen-for-a-day material. It was bliss. ``
It was her hat. A gold lamé fez, made for her by a bright young designer called Stephen Jones, with a golden asp colling down around her face. ´´Everything I do is because of Stephen´s hats. We met at college and he decided I was going to be his mannequin de vie. ´´ You can see why - she has every once of the cnosiderable aplomb it takes to carry off such extravagant millinery.
´´With some of the hats you have to have your hair in a very complex style, which can take ages to do, and some of them are a nightmare to wear. Real pressure on the head. But I love it. One of my ideas about designing clothes was to make everything uncomfortable so that you are always aware of what you´re wearing, I suppose I´m real woman - I want to be trussed up. ´´
Kim is 21. She comes from Basingstoke. ´´I was a really ugly 13 years old with spots and thin legs. I weighed six and a half stone and had steel glasses and was really dreadful. My mother would never buy me mad clothes so I went to jumble sales and bought things.´´
´´ I got sent home from school for wearing hats. They hated it. And I wore very red lipstick, Mandarin Red by Rimmel. They were always taking me to the headmistress´´ office and telling me to take if off. But I wouldn´t
´´ I don´t really have day clothes and evening clothes. I wear everything at whatever time. I have a face rave which I wear for two weeks solid, then I throw it away and wear something else.´´
She lives off the Tottenham Court Road with about ten other people and they are always among the best dressed at Blitz, St Moritz and other places for avant-garde young Londoners.
´´It´s really incestuous with clothes in this house - everyone just rushes in and borrows everyone else´s things ´´
Their squat is pretty squalid but Kim´s room is almost Japanese in its sparse formality. Beautifully arranged flowers, music from Radio Three, John Donne poems by the single bed, a clothes rail, the hats lined up on a shelf.
Her future plans include making an EP with an all-girl group called The Love Handles. ´´ I´m such a vile poseur ´´, she says in an endearing misture of seiousness and camp, ´´ I expect I´ll have my come-uppance one day ´´
Miles Chapman - Over 21 Magazine - 1980
