In conversation with Hamish Powell: the florist behind Charli XCX's wedding bouquet

Hamish Powell is a florist, technically. But really, he’s a feeler first: a professional sentimentalist armed with secateurs. If you’ve recently seen Charli XCX clutching a bouquet that looked like it was plucked from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, that was him. Often described as surreal and atmospheric, his awe-inducing floral installations now adorn window displays for Loewe, Hermes, and the like. But while his work is often associated with the world of luxury, Powell isn’t only in it for the glamour: he’s here for the rot too. 

In a digital sit-down, we talked about the fleeting opulence of his creations and the beauty found in their inevitable decay. For Powell, true art lies in ephemerality – and in giving it a starring role. 

Hi Hamish! How are you today?
I’m good. Busy. Sometimes I try and organise to have all my meetings in one day so I can get them all out of the way, but then at the end of the day, I’m like, who did I talk to? What was I doing? 

So, Charli XCX’s wedding. Massive. How did that even come about?
I’m still processing it. I’ve been a Charli XCX fan for over a decade, so it was a big deal to be involved in such an important day for her. But also, it felt like a recognition of my taste to be associated with her circle. But I didn’t anticipate the exposure it would give my business. I mean, I gained 15,000 followers just from that one post.

Really? That’s crazy. Did she credit you in any of her photography, or was it purely by your own posts?
It was so nice that a lot of my followers also like Charli. Whenever a brand or a magazine posted pictures of Charli, they were saying she’s wearing this dress, these sunglasses, she got married in this place. And no one would mention the accessory that I made! But my followers were commenting, “and flowers by Hamish Powell!”, which was really nice. 

To feel that you have fans who are uplifting the art of floristry at large must have been really nice.
Yeah. For a long time, I’ve struggled with floristry just being seen as a service. No one wants to see me, I’m gone before the events start and the guests arrive, don’t make a mess, don’t make a sound. So to see people have the same point of view, that flowers are there to be appreciated, credited, and talked about… It was really rewarding. I think a big reason why I do what I do, or why I was put on this earth, is to bring attention to the beauty of flowers. I think everyone knows that flowers are beautiful. But they might need help noticing them in the first place.

You work in an industry where people spend a lot of money on flowers, and obviously they only last a few days. Why do you think that we’re so obsessed with beauty when it’s so fleeting?
I think because the best beauty is temporary beauty. If you think about human psychology, we’re really drawn to youth, and we’re drawn to those very temporary moments. If I think about it, this is exactly the reason I love flowers, because if you’re exposed to something beautiful for too long, it loses its specialness. That’s why I love that flowers die, and that my medium is temporary, because it really forces me to live in the moment, and to appreciate something while I have it. I think the biggest nightmare for me is to get used to beauty.

While people are very willing to accept that food is a fleeting experience worth spending money on than they are with flowers.
Yeah, I always make this comparison with food, actually. The same people who say the flowers are too expensive get on a waiting list for Noma in Copenhagen for months and months and months. That mouthful is going to last 30 seconds. 

Do you feel that it changed how you see time?
Yeah, I appreciate things in the moment more. And that has affected me on a deeper psychological level. I’d say that flowers did change my life. Because I love them so much. My whole life revolves around them. I write about them and I work with them. I’m inspired by them and I dream about them. I take the lessons from them. You really need to spend time with that friend and tell them that you love them. Because you don’t know when you might not have it. 

It’s so important to love loudly! And how do you look at it in terms of sustainability? I imagine a lot of people are kind of critical of things that are so short-lived. But how do you see that?
I mean, I feel really, really strongly about sustainability in the flower world. Because, after all, we are a luxury. We are not a necessity. They’re not saving lives. They’re not feeding mouths. It is an extra thing. And so damaging the environment for something that is not only temporary, but also not a necessity… sustainability needs to be at the front of everyone’s mind. Not because everyone needs to be told off or that everyone needs to do better, because I don’t think that’s helpful or healthy. But at the same time I’m very cautious not to use floristry as a scapegoat. I think because it’s so flamboyant and big and beautiful, it’s easy to use as a target for sustainability. I think everyone needs work. 

In the end, almost everything can be deemed unnecessary if you think about it. And besides luxury clients and weddings, do you ever do funerals?
Actually, in the time of my own studio, I’ve never done a funeral. I did funerals when I was first starting out, working in other flower shops. But no one has ever come to me for a funeral. I think it’s because my work comes across as a luxury. And I think people see death as a very humble thing, so they don’t associate it with luxurious, big, extravagant things. Which is interesting because at my own funeral, I want it to be like a crazy party. I want it to be over the top, everyone to be really drunk, like so kitsch. Because another amazing thing about flowers is that they bring the artist, the florist, to every human emotion throughout life. At every celebration, flowers are present. When a baby is born, when people get married, when somebody dies, that’s a hugely emotional concept if you think about it. Oh, it makes me emotional when I think about it. 

I saw this TikTok that you made where you picked and ate a flower off of the street and said, “Sorry I can literally find the joy and wonder in life anywhere”. I thought that was so sweet and sort of melancholic. Has that lens always been with you?
Yeah, I’ve always been a softie. I mean, I’m a Cancer. So if you believe in that, then that gives a lot of credit for that. I’ve always been a pacifist, and I was always breaking up fights between my brother and sister. Becoming a florist was timed with when I was kind of coming out of my teenage depression. Once I had therapy and went on medication, I started seeing life as it really is. Even though I was now seeing it how everyone else saw it, I was comparing it to a real point of darkness. So to me, it was like this paradise world where everything is so stunning and amazing and beautiful. And that was kind of the same time as when I started working with flowers. And so I guess my brain combined the two together and sort of placed this amazing joy into these things. And I started noticing beauty much more easily because I hadn’t seen it before. So tiny things like a plant growing through a crack in the concrete. I’ll see that and I’ll be like, that’s so crazy because that is life persisting through this horrible environment. But still, it’s managing to bloom and drink water and grow.

And even be beautiful at the same time.
For me, that is just such an essence of life and persistence and beauty. And the more that I observed it, and the more that I talked about it, the more I realised how fulfilling it was to look at life that way. And so it kind of became a habit to enjoy beauty. Which I feel lucky for, because it feels like I can never be sad anymore, because I live in such a beautiful world. I know there’s always something somewhere that can make me happy.

That’s lovely. I’m so glad you came out of that and now can see the world in all its joy and preciousness. So you told me that you’ve been thinking a lot about the subjectivity of beauty. How come this has been on your mind?
Often, brands come to me, and they already have a vision of what they want. And it’s my job to translate that into something that fits their image but also has a taste of me. Otherwise, why would they come to me and not anyone else? And obviously, I’m always going to try new or weird things. A lot of the time in this situation I feel like I spent most of my time re-describing the definition of beauty to this person. People confuse beauty with prettiness. But I find the most beauty when something’s a little bit weird. Like a bit of horror. Or something that’s a bit erotic. Because to me, beauty is something that takes my breath away, that stimulates my senses. 

Like the picturesque versus sublime philosophy in the 18th century.
Yeah. Beautiful things don’t just have to be fluffy, pink, and white. It ranges. It can be a carnivorous plant. Because if we’re talking in the grand scheme of things, from an almost religious point of view, life is beautiful. And so when you witness life happening, like a flower decaying, or something that’s just growing out of the soil, that is beautiful to me. Not just when it is fluffy and big and colourful. So I’m often trying to redefine these people’s minds, what it is to be beautiful. Which is strange, because I’m like two years old, so what do I know about beauty? 

Do you feel like it’s very freeing, in the fact that no one agrees on what beauty is, or is that frustrating?
It’s freeing. If we all had the same point of view, then it would be hugely awkward. The most beautiful thing about having a subjective eye on beauty is that it’s a reflection of you, it’s impacted by everything you’ve ever experienced in your life – what your parents taught you, all the ways that your friends act towards you, films that you’ve watched, songs that you loved as a teenager, create the language of beauty in your head. 

Are there any flowers that you don’t like or you refuse to work with?
I don’t think a flower can be blamed for its existence. But people are blamed for the way in which it’s been used. I used to have flowers that I was like, gross. But then maybe a client would come to me and say, Hey, we really love this kind of flower. And I would figure out a way to use it in a different context, and afterwards my relationship with that flower is changed.

I imagine it makes you realise why some flowers are seen as ‘basic’ or ‘boring’, because they’re cheap, long-lasting, and accessible. And really, what’s so bad about that? A lot of our bias against them comes from internalised classism.
It’s so interesting when you start to debunk all your own associations. 

Good exercise. If you could ban one idea that people have about beauty, what would it be?
I would ban the idea that beauty equals delicate, or elegant, or pretty. There are a lot of abstract words that get thrown around, especially in the luxury world, like ‘elegant’, like ‘dainty’, like ‘opulent’. I want to feel like beauty is punching me in the face, because I think excluding beauty to a small definition of pretty makes it feel soft and weightless. But it’s more powerful than that. ur whole society is now run by beauty. What we look like, how we show ourselves, it controls fashion, makeup, magazines, prints, movies, everything. Beauty is a force.

It also keeps it in kind of a crafty realm, instead of this big art kind of thing.
I’ve experienced that by going through phases of what I call myself in my job. I remember being in my first flower shop, and I was asking my boss, ‘so, when do I get to call myself a florist’? I started by washing the floor and cleaning the buckets. Then as time went on, and I feel like every person like me goes through this journey, you start to think, actually “I’m more than a florist. A florist is someone selling flowers in a train station shop. I’m an artist. I’m a floral designer.” And then you go with that for a little while, and then you realise actually, we’ve lost it. Florists, all florists, no matter how they’re doing it, whether it’s a grandma in a very small town in Italy making little bud vases, or if it’s Weirdo Hamish in London making sculptures with flowers, we’re all artists with flowers. So we’re all florists. I’m proud to call myself a florist.

Love that! So how do you use flowers to challenge conventional ideas of beauty?
I think by giving a platform to the uglier things, to the horror, the erotic. I love flowers that are sexy. And I love when it feels naughty using them. 

What’s a fun floral memory?
I remember when I first started working in flowers, there was this hotel that we used to do very classic arrangements in. But I was trying to do cool stuff. And I’d use certain flowers, and the hotel manager would come out and be like, that’s so vulgar. And in my head, I’d be like, yes exactly! I think the most fun ones are when there’s something that I’ve never done before. I remember a party in Cannes a couple of years ago, we had to do big flower arrangements at the bottom of the pool. I had never made an arrangement underwater before. But there I was in Cannes, in my little swimming trunks with a snorkel, arranging flowers under the water. We initially pre-made a couple, but we found that arranging in the air and arranging it in water are two totally different worlds. So we had to just arrange it at the bottom of the pool. Kind of scary.. But so fun. I loved it. The fact that I was doing something new after this many years of being in the industry, those are the fun projects to me. I’m a beginner at underwater arranging. Who’d have thought? 

Can you take us back to the moment that you realised that flowers were not just pretty, but life-defining for you?
Everyone has always known that my thing is flowers. I think it was probably when I was a kid and I was always playing in the garden and making nests out of branches and sticks. Little did I know, I was basically doing floristry. I probably developed muscle memory from these compositions. I was an expert at three.

And on a last note, if you ever get married, what do you think you would do florally?
I’ve thought about this before, because you know, it’s a big deal. I cross my fingers that I get married one day. I have florist friends across the whole world and I would love to invite each of them to choose a part of my wedding. And they can do anything they’ve ever wanted to do. It doesn’t have to match. It’s about going through this journey of seeing all my friends expressing themselves. I want to see how they felt inspired by the day or the location. I think we’ve lost track of why people get married. You know, everyone now is like, oh, it’s just a time for photo opportunities. But it’s actually a celebration of everyone that you love in your life, getting everyone in one place to celebrate your love. So I think if I did the flowers in that way, it’s kind of a reminder of that these are all the people I love, and we’re all contributing our love in however we want to do it. I just have to convince them all to fly out to wherever my weird location for my wedding is. And by then, I’ll hopefully be really, really, really rich, so I can pay them all as well. God knows they deserve it.