Fashion stylist Bay Garnett shows us around her Shepherd's Bush home

Known for her eclectic and narrative images, the fashion stylist Bay Garnett proves life at home is as storied as her famous photographs. By Tilly Macalister-Smith
Credit: Chris Tubbs
Chris Tubbs
Tilly Macalister-Smith15 September 2016

Walking into Bay Garnett’s Shepherd’s Bush kitchen on a late summer afternoon is not unlike walking into one of her fashion images. The French doors are thrown open into the garden and a vase of red roses and other flowers picked from the rambling bushes that frame the back doors sits on her giant, aged-oak kitchen table. ‘I want things to have a bit of a story,’ she says, pulling up a chair. Fittingly, a photograph of Stella Tennant overlooking Damascus hangs as a backdrop. The image was taken by Garnett’s partner, the photographer Tom Craig.

Garnett, a fashion stylist, and one of the best-connected women in London, is known for creating almost filmic images woven through with narrative. Her shoots have taken her to various corners of the world; from Syria to Hungary and Sweden — often working in partnership with Craig. ‘I like clothes to blend into the environment,’ she says. ‘When we shot Guinevere Van Seenus in Hungary we found these extraordinary communist hotels which had been abandoned, there were all these chairs just left piled up. I used high fashion clothes in washed-out colours and managed to make them look not so expensive, but that’s what I wanted.’

While her fashion images are escapist, Garnett herself is grounded. Like her three-storey home, she is welcoming and animated. Magazines, squidgy toys and souvenirs brought home from shoots are scattered about. Propped on top of a vintage dresser filled with glassware is a piece of 1950s propaganda art unearthed in a junk shop on that Damascus trip. ‘I always bring back a souvenir, although I want less stuff now,’ she says.

The kitchen, complete with a cream Aga, is the crucible of family life, which includes Craig, their children, Billy, 10, and Sylvie, 7, and Smudge, a Lancashire/Collie cross who joined the family last Christmas. ‘It’s a full house and it’s not placid but I like that,’ she says, warmly. ‘People swing by with their kids all the time. Often there’s not a family dinner because either I’m working or Tom’s working, so that’s quite rare.’ But, she hastens to add, ‘I cook a really good Bolognese and Tom’s an instinctively good cook. I’ve never once seen him look at a recipe book, he’s one of those people who can make something out of nothing and it always tastes delicious.’

Fashion wasn’t always Garnett’s calling card. She studied art history and modern history at Exeter University and today almost every inch of wall space in the house is filled with paintings and photographs; there’s the intimate snap she took of Tennant, a close friend, in bed; an outtake from her first-ever fashion shoot with Kate Moss; a portrait illustration of her by Yannick Vu; a framed cover of Interview magazine signed for her mother, Polly Devlin, by Andy Warhol after she interviewed him. To further her education in art and life, Garnett then decamped to Venice and took up an internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation (Bay’s parents honeymooned at the house before it was deemed a foundation and Guggenheim was made godmother to Bay’s sister, Rose). ‘It was amazing, I was very lucky. I spent five months living just off the Rialto Bridge and had a love affair with this amazing half German, half Japanese guy who spoke eight languages.’

Bay Garnett at home

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Back at her home, and on the ground floor, half of the double sitting room is painted a delicate tea-rose pink and furnished with a green fireplace — ‘People say pink and green should never be seen but I love it’ — while the other side is covered in deep blue Christian Lacroix leopard-print wallpaper. Out of sync with the vintage furniture and artefacts, Garnett is thrilled by her most recent purchase — a massive flat- screen TV, which is yet to arrive. ‘I’ve never had one in the sitting room!’ she squeals.

Upstairs in her bedroom, a Picasso lithograph of a reclining nude hangs above the marble fireplace. ‘It’s a print,’ she insists, keen not to posture it as the real thing. While surprisingly modest in size for a stylist, her cluttered wardrobe is well-appointed with pieces that would send fashion fans into a frenzy; she pulls out a military jacket embellished with jet beads designed by Marc Jacobs for his last collection as creative director at Louis Vuitton in 2013 — a seminal piece. The single rail is organised a little like one in the charity stores she regularly frequents. ‘I love the British Red Cross shop on Old Church Street,’ she says of her favourite Chelsea haunt for designer cast-offs. ‘Half of my clothes are from charity shops.’ Garnett arguably coined the fashion verb ‘thrifting’, meaning to dig around in charity shops for hidden gems that can range from museum-quality designer garments to no-name tatty vintage dresses. When she arrived in New York in 1996 and was working as an assistant at an advertising agency, she mapped out her way around the city via vintage stores. ‘I used to find a lot of Saint Laurent in Queens,’ she remembers. It was at this time that she co-founded the now defunct Cheap Date fanzine with pal Kira Jolliffe, which caught the eye of British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman. Her first commissioned fashion shoot for the magazine soon followed: Kate Moss photographed at home in Regent’s Park by Juergen Teller. ‘I was clueless. I’d never called in clothes from PRs for shoots before, I’d just used my thrift clothes, and I never assisted. I had no agenda, it was very pure,’ she says coolly.

Inside Bay's kitchen
Chris Tubbs

Earlier this year, Garnett and Jolliffe launched Fanpages, an updated concept of the fanzine with contributions from friends including Chloë Sevigny, Bella Freud and Karen Elson (the next issue is out February 2017). Garnett’s upbringing, much like her own look, was genuinely bohemian, although she’s sceptical of the label. ‘I don’t know what that word means any more,’ she says, scathing of fashion’s use of it to describe anything that looks vaguely vintage-inspired. ‘I like what I like. My style hasn’t really changed over the last 10 years.’ What she likes is ‘a Victorian puffy shoulder, or a sweatshirt and a skirt. I’ve got a lot of hippie dresses but I’ll wear them with a beautifully cut blazer. I’ve always loved the gender-bender things. I don’t like the middle of the road.’

Bay’s love for Louis Vuitton extends to soft furnishings
Chris Tubbs

Born in Bath, she grew up in Gloucester-shire in what she calls a ‘busy and creative female household’ headed by her mother, the writer Polly Devlin OBE, who authored the Vogue Book of Fashion Photography in 1979, and worked at British and American Vogue. Bay, 41, is the youngest of three sisters: Rose Garnett, 44, is head of Development & Creative at Film4, and Daisy Garnett, 42, is a London-based writer. The sisters all have two children each and the family regularly hangs out en masse.

When she was growing up it was her mother who ‘really cared about the way things looked,’ says Garnett. ‘She used to have a library and her books were full of women I wanted to look like, such as Georgina Howell and Brigid Keenan.’ While boarding at Hanford School in Dorset, she would escape to her father Andy’s house in Bruton, Somerset, on weekends. ‘He was an engineer and loved discovering how things worked. But he was actually really bohemian. He would never call himself an artist but he had an amazing eye and a lot of his friends [including Anthony Fry, George Melly and Domenico Gnoli] were well-known artists.’ Andy passed away two years ago.

Garnett designed the Fanpages sweatshirt,  available at Dover Street Market.
Chris Tubbs

Returning to London from New York in 2002, Garnett enjoyed the capital’s eclectic nightlife. ‘I was best friends with [make-up artist] Charlotte Tilbury. We met at a rave on an industrial estate in Deptford in the early Nineties.’ It was through Tilbury that she met Craig: ‘I was going to this party and I remember I was wearing this massive fox-fur coat with huge shoulders. I was in such a bad mood because I’d recently been dumped by somebody and as I was storming out this handsome guy stopped me in the doorway. I barely looked up and was like, “Can you move please?”’ she says, laughing. ‘A couple of years later I was driving and the radio in my old car had broken so I was listening to music on my headphones and nearly drove into him. I was on my way to the gym and had grizzly hair and looked rough but he was just laughing. And then there was another party I was at with Charlotte and she kept dragging me over to him and that was it, we fell for each other.’

Garnett and her family moved to their Victorian house five years ago. ‘We were living just round the corner so we didn’t bother to get a removal van. Instead, we carried everything — lamps, knives and forks, the lot. It turned into a nightmare.’ They’ve done little structural work to the house although they are constructing an office for Garnett in the garden: currently bare, save for a lone framed poem by her uncle Seamus Heaney (her mother’s brother-in-law), which is propped on one of the empty bookshelves.

Although the family often visits friends in Wiltshire or Ascot, as well as occasionally escaping to Scotland to stay with Stella [Tennant] during the school holidays,nothing, says Garnett, beats the feeling of returning to her warm and eclectic home.

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