For another scene she found him a genuine LA cop outfit (“tailored to fit his sleek form”).”George is a real sweetie because he doesn’t pretend to be anything that he isn’t,” she says. “Actually I’m bloody knackered because we were up until five in the morning on the last day to get it finished. That’s one disadvantage of not working on feature films – no union-regulated working hours.”Bowen is disarmingly casual about almost every aspect of what she does, and utterly unafraid to express her opinions. (She does, however, dodge giving her actual age, stating, “I’m in my thirties, this is a town where these things matter.”) Sitting in casual stretch pants in her mock-Tudor mansion in the heart of Hollywood, she releases a torrent of stories about models, actors and – her biggest bugbear – the publicists who insidiously run the entertainment industry.”They foster this culture of dependency, always trying to make the star feel insecure and inadequate. They say things like, `you know, maybe you’re right about your legs being a little fat.’ I had Minnie Driver in this house for a publicity shot – a very ambitious young lady, I must say – and it was all going fine until the publicist showed up. She went, `Why is Minnie wearing Armani? Armani is an old woman’s designer.’ It was all bollocks, of course, but Minnie bought straight into it.
And the session went to pot.”Bowen’s reputation as a straight-shooter has been partly responsible for her success, though not without a few bumps along with way. (She is currently in dispute with another stylist – he has been nominated for a VH1 award for a video that Bowen jointly styled. She has received no credit.) She got interested in working as a stylist, she says, because she couldn’t stand the fashion industry. “It’s a goldfish bowl, an empty, worthless place,” she says.Born in London, she studied fashion and textiles, then pure fashion at St Martins in London. After that, she landed a job in Australia as fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar, a job she quit on principle after her editor was fired. She then had several jobs in fashion journalism, including a short stint on the ill-fated newspaper the Sunday Correspondent and periodic freelance pieces for The Guardian.
“That was when I found out that you cannot write about the fashion business and be honest,” she said. “I wrote a piece slagging off British designers and The Guardian tossed me out on my ear.”Arriving in Hollywood five years ago, she started doing celebrity shoots with the photographer Wayne Maser (“a fantastically talented but despicable man”) before teaming up with the commercials director Tony Kaye, another Brit famous for not suffering fools – and, on occasion, suing them “He changed my life,” she says. “He’s an amazingly talented, intelligent, wonderfully mad person and we got along brilliantly. He never gave me any grief because we understood each other completely.