Bay Garnett has never been one for bowing to convention. The stylist – who’s worked with almost every important fashion photographer you can think of – and host of This Old Thing? podcast is the self-titled “queen of thrift”, having made it her mission to make shoots more sustainable. Her commitment to more conscious consumption has seen her style Kate Moss in second-hand clothes, putting on Oxfam catwalks for London Fashion Week and producing pre-loved pop-ups at Selfridges. Bay first caught the eye of Vogue’s then editor Alexandra Shulman, however, in the early 2000s, who’d seen the spoof adverts Bay had styled for her own offbeat shoestring zine, Cheap Date, using solely vintage items. Shulman offered Bay a job on the glossy – and she never looked back.
Knowing all this, it comes as no surprise that Bay’s home in Shepherds Bush, west London, is filled with curious one-offs, charity-shop finds and sentimental keepsakes, from old needlework pieces to vintage drawings. It fits, too, that she should favour retro tunes (who doesn’t love a bit of Smooth Radio?). “I love my house,” she says of the three-storey Victorian number she shares with her long-term partner, Tom, her children, Billy and Sylvie, and two “nutty but amazing” dogs – a lurcher called Smudge and a rescue mountain dog from Bosnia called Paddy. Something of a sentimentalist, as we learn, she also loves everything in it; valuable or not, she says, “it all matters to me”. What does life at home with Bay look like then? Busy, messy and magically madcap is our impression. “You can often find us sitting in front of the TV with ice cream, watching reruns of the American Office with Steve Carrell. Hard to beat.”
