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The Gen t lewoman

Issue 1 Spring Summer 2013/14

DGuinness

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D A P H N E G U I N E S S

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“I thought by overdressing I was disguising myself and no one could see me, like the child who covers her eyes and thinks she’s invisible.”

D A P H N E G U I N E S S

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“I don’t approach fashion; fashion approaches me!”

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Fashion’s reigning eccentric icon is as deeply complex as she is fascinatingly

stylish.

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Daphne Guinness squeals into the phone from a grass hut she has sequestered herself in some-where in the Mexican desert. It’s late last November and Guin-ness, who has been called many things in the fashion press but prefers to be called an artist, is interrupting her meditation re-treat to discuss her remarkable personal style, a topic she is equal parts deadly serious about and completely uninterested in.

Fashion is a topic she loves, but she loathes discussing it at length. In the same breath, she will discount her completely original and magnificently com-plex outfits as “merely something I do to put a smile on people’s faces” and then provide a laun-dry list of visual references she incorporates into her looks, from Miuccia Prada to Marcel Proust.

As if to prove this nonchalance, Guinness abruptly shifts con-versational gears and brings up the baby snake she found in the road outside her hut. She scooped it up just before it was run over and brought it home with her. “I’ve tried to release it three times, but it keeps com-ing back to me and follows me all around,” she says, giggling. “It’s my baby!” This conversation ends with her asking what baby snakes eat and then hanging up after announcing she must find her new baby some crickets.

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Snake charmer is an appropri-ate metaphor for Guinness. In the past few years, she has emerged as a modern pied pip-er of fashion, a sartorial leader who’s been cited as an inspi-ration to everyone from Lady Gaga to Tom Ford, from the re-tired Valentino to virtually the entire blogosphere. “Life is a stage for Daphne,” says Valen-tino. “Funerals or balls, she al-ways makes a performance. But behind the extraordinary looks is the sweetest and most tender human being.” Ford, who cast Guinness in the final look of his much-ballyhooed womenswear fashion show in September, is equally effusive: “Daphne is not just a great and stylish beauty; she’s also an honest and true person inside. She is so com-pletely real and simple and straightforward in the best way.” Her current love interest, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, once said to her that she was not a person but a concept. (Apart from her clothes, it’s Guinness’s relationship with the married Lévy, who she finally relents is “the love of my life,” that’s stok-ing the flames of gossip around her. But more on that later.)

Guinness isn’t merely a girl who puts together a look and calls it art. She’s a hive of creative ac-tivity, always cooking up a new project, like her eponymous fra-grance with Comme des Gar-çons, which is sold at London’s Dover Street Market, the Rei Kawakubo--owned retail tem-ple. She was also a muse for François Nars’s cosmetics line. She’s made her own short films, and she produced Sean Ellis’s Oscar-nominated 2004 short, Cashback. And she doesn’t just model for photographers like David LaChapelle; she collabo -rates. But not all of her artistic efforts have been publicized: She is also a poetry devotee, she has studied Shakespeare at the Royal Academy of Dra-matic Art in London, and once, at Larry Gagosian’s house in Manhattan, she took me onto the back porch to sing in a perfect soprano a selection from an op-era that she’d studied in her 20s.

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Guinness’s artistic drive is a potent and unstoppable thing. Currently on the roster, there’s the much-anticipated exhibition of her personal wardrobe at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, which will open in September and feature pieces from the likes of Azzedine Alaïa, Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano, and Alexander McQueen. Two more projects: a piece of diamond-encrusted “couture armor” she has been working on for the past four years with jeweler Shaun Leane and plans to exhibit

at one of Jay Jopling’s London galleries as well as an art film she’s producing about the mysterious death of American actress Jean Seberg. (The star of the cult film Breath-less was found dead in the back of her car in Paris 10 days after disappearing, with a cryptic suicide note in hand.) “I’m playing Jean Seberg, and it’s looking good,” Guin-

ness says.

But what she is best at, and what her personal art truly is, even if she hates to hear it, is merely getting dressed. She does this without concern or hesitation. She throws on a couture dress the way another person would put on a pair of sweatpants. She clips

carats of diamonds to her coif the way a child would tie a ribbon around her ponytail. “If I think about it too much, I can’t get dressed,” she says with a shrug.

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Loree Rodkin rings available at brownsfashion.com

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These days, Guinness is fond of sky-high stilettos that don’t have heels, layers of sheer fabrics, feathers, high collars, and piling her hair high on her head with giant dia-

monds poking out like little nymphs in the forest. Last summer, I went with her to some fabric stores in L.A. to buy rubber printed with iridescent optical illusions that she

had cut into leggings. Last December, at the Art Basel festivities in Miami Beach, she arrived one night wearing a piece of lace tacked to her head with ornate brooches,

leather pants, the leather harness of a McQueen gown she had bought years before under a ruffled satin jacket, and not a stitch more.

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When she can’t find what she likes, she designs it

herself. She estimates that she created more than

100 pieces in 2010 alone, and despite the demand that could exist for such

treasures, she has no interest in producing them for anyone but herself. “I

was raised in a family that talked about history, not business,” she explains, adding that she doesn’t

know the first thing about production. “I’m complete-

ly unemployable!”

The word curate is over-used when it comes to fashion, but Guinness

does manage her closet like a gallery of sorts. “I

treat clothing or a piece of jewelry like it was a piece

of art,” she says, “even though people who collect clothes get a bad rap be-

cause they’re told it’s all vanity.” Like the late Isabella Blow, her

devoted friend, she belongs to a rare group of women who can

conduct entire conversations with their style. (Last year, in the wake

of Blow’s suicide, when the ex-ecutors of her estate were forced to put her clothes up for auction,

Guinness purchased the entire lot privately, halting the auction

plans. She did it “to retain the integrity of Blow’s vision.”)

Perhaps Guinness’s most unique sartorial trait is that at a time

when nearly anyone can borrow a dress to walk down anything

resembling a red carpet, she ac-tually pays for almost everything she wears. “My biggest [fashion] mistakes have always been when

I’ve borrowed something,” she explains. “It’s either too big for

me or I hate the color or it smells of someone else’s body odor.”

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Guinness is both a brewery heiress and a

granddaughter of Diana Mitford, one of the six

legendary Mitford sisters who fascinated 20th-

century British society with their fun, feuds, and

occasional fascist con-nections. She says her childhood was happy

and slightly unconven-tional. She fluttered be-

tween luxurious homes in Ireland and England and

a bohemian compound in the expat colony of

Cadaqués, Spain, where Man Ray and Salva-

dor Dalí were frequent visitors. After meeting

Greek shipping heir Spyros Niarchos in a bar

in the Swiss Alps when she was 17, Guinness

married him in 1987 at the age of 19. Until their divorce in 1999, she was

entirely submerged in her husband’s life, and she

rarely crossed beyond its gilded borders.

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There have been reports of a jet-set life brimming with contemporary art, diamonds, planes, and

five-star hotels, and there has also been gossip of

dark moments. Today, however, Guinness will say only that her ex-husband is

“a genius. We were both very young and in love.”

She maintains that she has nothing but respect

for him, and since he is a private person she cannot

comment on him or her life as his wife. She adds

that since she has three

children, one can’t blame her for maintaining some

discretion. (Guinness once told me that she’d accom-

panied her eldest, Nicolas, to class when he was a

freshman at his East Coast Ivy League school dressed in her couture uniform, so

one can anticipate that her children would appreciate all the discretion they can

get.)

When Guinness and Niarchos split, she re-

verted to her titled maiden name. (That’s the Honor-

able Daphne Guinness to you.) In time, she sold the family home in North London and started living

in hotels and, eventually, a spacious apartment in the former Stanhope Hotel on

New York’s Fifth Avenue that overlooks the Met and

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As a divorcée, she seemed to truly relish the freedom of expression her new life provided. A single woman for the first time since she was a teenager, Guinness, full

of sartorial experimentation, dived headfirst into the art and fashion sets. With Blow, she began to travel in fashion circles, forming what became deep relationships with

Philip Treacy and ultimately McQueen. After at first declining to be introduced--”I don’t have to be friends with someone to respect their work,” she says--she met McQueen by chance when he noticed her on the street and introduced himself as the designer of the

jacket she was wearing. “He tapped me on the shoulder, and we headed to the pub. That was it!”

Guinness says she misses McQueen immensely and that he made her laugh more than anyone else. “He was so bright, he could see things in five dimensions,” she says. She considered him a true artist. “Lee didn’t take any prisoners, and when he smelled shit,

he said it!” What endeared her the most was how he would always save seats at his shows for his longtime friends, who remained loyal to him until the very end. “To be

unconditionally loved by someone ...” she trails off. “He changed my life.”

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“Her style is completely unique and often eccentric, but her keen understanding of her looks, her body, and most importantly her character and personality, make everything

that she wears feel as though it has been made for her - and, of course, in many in-stances it has. Daphne...realizes that other things in life are much more important and so she has not fear when it comes to dressing, and this fearlessness and total security

with who whe is as a woman creates a dazzling character.” - Tom Ford

The Evolution Of Daphne Continues ...