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.
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.
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.
We're obviously in a strange environment where practically anyone can set themselves up as a pundit of sorts. It's all about sorting the wheat from the chaff, and I'm very interested in reading different points of view, and certainly different generations than my own that have such a very different world view.
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.
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.
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.
In the face of postwar austerity, hundreds of brides-to-be across the country sent Princess Elizabeth their clothing coupons so that she could have the dress of their dreams.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I was 14, I entered British Vogue's annual talent contest and got a special mention. I went up to London to meet the editors and wrote about it in my high school magazine.
