IDEA’s Angela Hill Is as Discerning About Looks as She Is About Books

Officially, IDEA is a secondhand bookshop in London, but it also feels like Angela Hill’s living room. Fashion designers, art students, and her many acquired “nieces and nephews”—young people she’s taken under her wing over the years—mill about and look through shelves full of treasures like rare Juergen Teller books and 1980s guides to Japanese interior design. A record from her not-for-sale collection spins on the turntable. (She’s learned nothing puts people in a purchasing mood quite like Nina Simone and Philip Glass.) On the table in the rear room, San Pellegrino and shortbread biscuits are laid out. Tea and coffee might be offered.

Collecting beautiful photo books was a passion of Hill’s long before it became her business. In the mid-1980s, she lived in Bloomsbury, a part of London then known for its abundance of used-book dealers. “I had a little trail down Charing Cross Road, and I was there every single day, without fail,” she remembers. “I knew their stock better than they did.” Her curating strategy today is the same as it was back then: “I just think, God, she looks so cool. It could be a book about 1970s Ibiza; it could be an early Martha Stewart interiors book. It’s just all about image.” Spotlighted on IDEA’s Instagram feed, recent acquisitions include a first edition of Mario Sorrenti’s 2019 book Kate, an official Spice Girls photo album from the 1990s, and the original Japanese promotional program for The Matrix, complete with a mirrored foil cover.

In addition to books, Hill is fanatical about fashion. The first thing many customers notice is her head-to-toe approach to dressing. “Every season, I buy a full outfit for every day of the week,” she explains. “I only ever have seven outfits. I like to open my wardrobe and just see everything laid out.” She used to cycle through seasons of Celine, from Phoebe Philo’s era to Hedi Slimane’s, but she recently switched to Prada and Miu Miu because of the stylist Lotta Volkova, who started working with Miu Miu in 2021. (Volkova, she says, “suddenly made Miu Miu look like the cool lesbian girl.”) At the end of each season, Hill sells all the looks and buys the next seven—there’s no storage unit with the very best of the brands’ past collections. “I don’t have attachments,” she says, though she admits that this season she might keep the Miu Miu polos and pajamas because they’re so practical.

Hill’s appreciation of the fashion world is reciprocated. Designers and their teams frequently rent out IDEA to scour her shelves. “I see collections come out, and only I know the books they’ve been inspired by,” she says. “Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the images in those books aren’t on Google.” Her connection to fashion is evident in the invitations and letters fixed to the shop’s door: Christmas cards from Gucci, personal notes from Alessandro Michele and Kim Jones. Hill fondly remembers the day Calvin Klein bounded up her stairs, about a decade ago. “He was just lovely, like a little sprite,” she recalls. “He asked me for books on minimalism, and I said, ‘Calvin, you are minimalism.’ ”

Hill, 61, has been interested in style since her 20s, when she worked at the boutique Browns. After that, she assisted fashion editors on ad campaigns and magazine shoots. Being on set with the photographer Pamela Hanson inspired her to take up photography. “I just couldn’t stop looking at Hanson and thinking, That’s what I want to do,” recalls Hill. Eventually, her pictures were published in magazines like Dazed, EXIT, and Purple, and she became known for the way she shot young women navigating adolescence.

Photography didn’t pay enough to support her life, but increasingly, and accidentally, book collecting did. In the late 1990s, Sarah Andelman, the founder of the revered, now-closed Paris boutique Colette, bought books from Hill’s personal vintage collection to sell at the shop. The venture proved so popular that Dover Street Market tapped her to open a bookshop in their London outpost in 2006. Three years later, Hill and her partner, David Owen, who has comanaged IDEA every step of the way, pitched a pop-up shop to the St Martins Lane Hotel, in London. Their elder daughter, Iris, suggested the name IDEA—for Iris, David, Edith (their younger daughter), and Angela. When the hotel stint ended, Hill and Owen moved the shop into the Wardour Street location they’re still in now. For more than a decade, IDEA was appointment-only, but last year they opened the store to the public. Even so, it’s still something of an insider secret: Very few clues to its existence are visible from the street.

Despite the store’s success, photography remains Hill’s first priority. A self-proclaimed “collector of people,” she will often take an interesting-looking customer’s information and cast them in a future shoot. “I get random amazing emails from her, like the emails big tech CEOs send in the middle of the night,” says Clarke Rudick, the editor in chief and creative director of the indie fashion magazine Crosscurrent. “They’ll be like: ‘Willem Dafoe’s coming to the shop next week. What do you think about shooting him?’ ”

I visited IDEA in January, a few days after the director David Lynch had died. Hill, who was wearing a gray Miu Miu suit and skirt, was inspecting her latest mailbag delivery. There were multiple Lynch-related items, including the seventh draft of the script for his 1984 adaptation of Dune, a Twin Peaks pictorial, and his 1994 book Images. I asked if they had been rush ordered after his death. No, said Hill, they were purchased before. As fans mourned and looked for relics of his work, she already had the gems in her hands.

IDEA products courtesy of Idea.

Produced by Philippe Rodrigues Neto at New Collective; photography assistant: Luke Fullalove; fashion assistant: Ryan Wohlgemut.