Career
Early career
McDowell taught history for a few years. Having lost his interest in teaching, he became an actor, appearing in several episodes of BBC Radio 4 soap opera The Archers and various TV bit-parts, usually as a generic foreigner. His social life brought him into contact with people in the fashion industry, and this inspired another change of career.
McDowell settled in Rome in the early 1970s when a friend offered him a design job. He later began working for the couturier Pino Lancetti, who taught him the art of Haute couture. He was subsequently employed by the National Chamber of Italian Fashion (Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana), and Laura Biagiotti. At Biagiotti, he brokered an exclusive deal for the company to design uniforms for Alitalia.
Professional journalist
McDowell returned to London after spending 10 years in Rome. In 1984 he established his reputation as a writer with McDowell’s Directory of 20th Century Fashion, which became a standard reference work for fashion students. An article written for The Observer on Italian fashion led to invitations to write for other publications, and he began to focus on his emerging journalism career. He was appointed a fashion reporter for The Sunday Times in 1986.
In 1989, while on assignment in Cairo, McDowell escaped a fire at the Sheraton Heliopolis Hotel by jumping from a second-floor window, breaking his ankle. Three people were killed, including his friend and colleague Jackie Moore. To aid his recovery from the trauma he returned to Northumberland and rented a holiday cottage with a view of Lindisfarne, and wrote the novels A Woman of Style and A Woman of Spirit.
As his journalism career progressed, McDowell earned a reputation as a combative and independent-minded fashion critic. His "proudest moment" came when Giorgio Armani threatened to pull his advertising from The Sunday Times (at £50,000 a page) because McDowell had given one of his shows a bad review. He claims to have been banned from more fashion shows than any other writer. Alongside his newspaper work he continued to write books on the modern fashion industry and biographies of notable designers, including John Galliano, Manolo Blahnik and Ralph Lauren.
Later work
In 2003 McDowell set up 'Fashion Fringe', an annual competition to uncover promising fashion design talent and offer them professional mentorship. The initiative helped launch the careers of several designers, including Basso & Brooke, the inaugural winners in 2004, and Erdem Moralıoğlu, who won the following year. Owing to difficulties securing continued sponsorship, the scheme ended in 2013.
In 2008, McDowell served as editor-in-chief of short-lived fashion and style magazine, Distill. Reflecting on his career in a 2015 interview, he criticised what he regarded as the declining independence of contemporary fashion journalism, arguing that access to shows and a good seat allocation had become increasingly dependent on favourable coverage.
United Kingdom