Getting Dressed: Min Hogg
Brigid Keenan
I am definitely not good at spotting a trend: the Channel Tunnel, videos, the Beatles – I predicted they would all be failures. And when the first edition of the World of Interiors magazine appeared I was certain it would flop because though it showed glorious pictures taken in wonderful houses, readers couldn’t buy the furnishings. Needless to say, the magazine was a triumph for journalist Min Hogg, whose idea it was: within months there were three publishers fighting to buy it (Condé Nast won) and I myself had taken out a subscription.
How Hogg got to create her very own magazine is almost a fairy story: she started in journalism as a dogsbody at Queen magazine and then graduated, via the Observer, to becoming fashion editor of Harpers & Queen. From there she was tempted away to a Middle East glossy. When this folded, she took a sabbatical to think about her future and at that moment an ad appeared in one of the Sunday papers: ‘Publisher seeking editor for international decoration and arts magazine’. She was interviewed and hired by Irish magazine owner Kevin Kelly. ‘He more or less allowed me to do anything I wanted – it was my dream job. Of course I was terrified, too: I’d been on newspapers and magazines all my life, but to have to put the whole thing together myself was nerve-racking. On the other hand, I was quite old then, forty, and I had spent my whole life going to marvellous houses, travelling. I also have an obsession about things looking right, and I really just did the whole thing to please myself.’
As an ex-fashion editor and then the public face of World of Interiors, Hogg’s wardrobe was and is rich in good clothes – St Laurent, Valentino and others – but she is not snobbish about labels; she also likes Kos, H&M and Topshop (‘I bought the best mac ever at Topshop’). Far and away her favourite shop, though, is a small one at 36 Kinnerton Street, London SW1X 8ES called Egg (eggtrading.com). Egg clothes are big and baggy and hard to wear, but Hogg, at five foot six inches and with her distinctive turbaned head, carries them off beautifully. Her scarf habit started off because of her hair, she says. ‘I always wear a scarf ... It started long ago, I think it was because age was creeping up and old people with long hair is not my favourite look; also, I loathe going to the hairdresser so I dye my hair myself and snip away at my fringe, and because my hair is waist-length I can cut it myself when needs be.’ She ties her hair into a ponytail on top of her head, loops it around, pins it up and ties one of her hundreds of scarves over the top. The other thing she always wears are big, round dangly pearl earrings. Back in the day she made them herself from cheap pearl necklaces and hooks and chains bought in Berwick Street in London, but now they are done for her by Bond Street jeweller S J Phillips (www. sjphillips.com). Covetously, I asked if they sold them. ‘Certainly not’, she replied emphatically. ‘They are just for me.’ Hogg told me that she keeps her clothes for years and years. I thought, oh yes, I hate throwing things away too, but then she showed me what she calls The Room of Shame and I realised that she is a true hoarder – possibly the Queen of Hoarders. In the middle of this room stands a clothes rail groaning with garments on coat hangers, so tightly packed together you can hardly lift them off, while on hooks and shelves around the walls hang dozens and dozens of scarves, shawls, lace collars, handbags. The floor is carpeted with mostly flat-heeled soft shoes in various colours (from Morocco, I learned).
Hogg is sceptical about claims for beauty products (‘It’s all lies’); she washes her face with soap from a herb farm, also in Morocco (‘I have to go once a year to stock up on shoes and soap’), uses Boots Number 7 Protect and Perfect cream and a lipstick that is bright green but goes pink once on the skin. ‘Children think I am a witch when they see it.’ (www.ultraglowshop.com/magic-lips). I asked her about plastic surgery and was, once again, dumb-founded: ‘I’ve never had a facelift’, she said, ‘but I had a boob job, two years ago. It was part of my wanting things to look right – clothes never looked good on me because of my boobs, so I had them made smaller. I haven’t worn a bra since – heaven! It’s revolutionised my pleasure in getting dressed and shopping for clothes.’
Min Hogg, now 78 (‘Isn’t that ridiculous!’) retired from WOI in 2000, but when interiors designer Nicky Haslam asked her to design a wallpaper she sprang back into action and with an old colleague, Mike Tighe, produced a collection based on 18th-century engravings of seaweed. To see it, go to http://www.minhogg.com/wallpaper/.
In our picture Hogg wears an Egg top with a Chantal Thomas pleated skirt that is ‘decades old’.