Daphne Guinness

[Nymphaea]

Vanity Fair September 2013 A Blast of the Best

models

 

[anina]

After a long wait. I finally get to see Shakki. Just started, but came here to share the link (don't know how to embed videos except from YouTube, Sorry!

http://cinematique.com/watch/102

 

[anina]

Daphne Guinness: 'I was banned from having a bath in New York'
The fashion muse and heiress on wearing waterproof clothing, her love of dictionaries and an altercation with neighbours

'I wear a uniform that's black and white so I don't have to think': Daphne Guinness. Photograph: Alex Lake for the Observer

I think I'm invisible. I don't know why people pay attention to the way I dress.

When I was child I didn't want the cashmere-and-pearls look, as if I rode a pony, like other people I knew. I didn't have a pony and I certainly didn't know what to do with one.

I just get dressed. I wear a uniform that's typically black and white so I don't have to think. I have to be comfortable, so my look is an illusion. I have panels put in my clothes so they aren't restrictive and a lot of it is waterproof – I could go through a thunderstorm.

I was going to be a soprano. I'd got into Guildhall School of Music, but old Cupid came along and I got married [to shipping magnate Spyros Niarchos] at 19, had three great children and lived halfway up a mountain instead.

Shakespeare is my favourite author. If I had to go to a desert island I'd take his first folio. What I love is you never feel his ego – he reflects every emotion without revealing himself, which is extraordinary for a writer.

I love reading dictionaries. I love the 1926 Fowler's – he cracks me up.

Isabella Blow was a childhood friend. After I got divorced [in 1999] she let me help her and that's how I got involved in fashion. When she died I didn't want her to be remembered for suicide. There was so much to celebrate about her life and work, I just thought this can't end with everyone dressed in black.

I love talking to five-year-olds. I did some work with a group of them at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. They asked very good questions and they made me bags out of Sellotape – which I use, obviously.

Fashion seems to be on iPod Shuffle, it changes so quickly. You go up to someone dressed like a punk, thinking – "Wow, they'll be into the Ramones!" – and actually they're a stockbroker and you have to beat a hasty retreat. They've just read about punk in Vogue.

I don't have enough of a temper – that's my Hamlet side. I get more upset on behalf of others than myself, which probably isn't a good thing.

Flying scared me, so I did some parachuting. It was weird seeing my feet look bigger than a house, but it cured the fear.

I leave all my decisions to a predictor pen. You ask a question and click it, and the answer comes up: "Dude, no way!" or "Hell, yeah!"

I was legally banned from having a bath in New York State after a law suit with my neighbours [Guinness let her bath overflow multiple times in her Fifth Avenue apartment, flooding the floors below]. I could have fought them, but, I mean, who cares?

I'd never, ever, ever criticise what someone was wearing. They like what they like. I'm not the fashion police. Whatever makes you happy.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/nov/09/daphne-guinness-isabella-blow

 

[Nymphaea]

The Interview: Daphne Guinness by Net-A-Porter

The flamboyant, couture-loving heiress talks style and survival with VASSI CHAMBERLAIN

Photographs by JOHAN SANDBERG Styling by NATALIE BREWSTER

Sitting pin-chic in a Chanel dress and giant, heel-less Massaro platforms, the beautiful heiress Daphne Guinness giggles when I ask her what she has been up to. "You’re not going to believe it," she says, in her languorous, aristocratic voice. "I’ve been writing music at home in Ireland." Really? She lowers a diamond-jeweled hand into the vast Birkin bag at her feet and fishes around for an iPod. A haunting, Galadriel from Lord Of The Rings-like sound floods the room and everyone stops what they are doing. Where did that sound come from? "I have no idea, it just came out of me!" she says, honking charmingly, as if no one is more surprised than her.

The first time I met Daphne, heiress to the Guinness brewery fortune and couture collector extraordinaire, was with her best friend, the late fashion director Isabella “Issy” Blow, with whom I worked at Tatler magazine. It was 2002 and Daphne had joined us as a contributing fashion editor. Her 12-year marriage to Greek shipping heir Spyros Niarchos was over and she had recently returned to London with her three children and an undisclosed divorce settlement. She was sweet and intellectually curious, often quoting Nietzsche. Her softness was the perfect foil to Blow’s punky jolie laide. Like Blow, she was from a broken background; the sort where beauty was all around (her grandmother, Diana Mitford, was often likened to Botticelli’s Venus), but where secrets were kept behind a veil of aristocratic silence. She was 13 when she found out her father, Lord Moyne, had fathered three children by his mistress. She is far too well-bred to talk about the effect it had on her, her brother Sebastian and her French-born mother, the artist Suzanne Lisney (a muse to Man Ray and Salvador Dalí), but Blow recognised her sadness. Together they revered their own particular vision of beauty. “Issy was so cultured,” says Guinness. The pair were endlessly planning fashion shoots (always somewhere fraught with drama, like the Middle East), dressed like 18th-century French royals on acid.

Those days feel like a lifetime ago now. Blow, worn down by depression, took her own life in May 2007, leaving behind a deep chasm in the fashion world and a closet of important British fashion. She kept most of it in the Tatler office; I remember piles of ornate McQueen, exquisite Givenchy and a Marchesa dress that stretched, fan-like, over her bosom.

In 2010, Blow’s greatest fashion discovery and Guinness’ close friend, Alexander “Lee” McQueen, hung himself at home in Mayfair.” He was the last person I thought would do that,” says Guinness. “But I think he had almost said it all.” McQueen’s legacy was never in danger of being forgotten, but Blow’s less tangible one was. So when her closet was put up for auction, Guinness, who couldn’t bear the idea of her friend’s
clothes being scattered, bought the lot. “I haven’t dared try anything on,’ she says, “she would have struck me down with a thunderbolt.” And now her extraordinary couture collection that she wore daily, even to the supermarket, is being exhibited at Somerset House in London. “Oh, I can’t wait for you to see it – it’s even better than Savage Beauty,” says Guinness, referring to the 2011 McQueen exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

So what next? “I’m passionate about surviving,” she says. “I’m trying to build something of my life.” She means this honestly, but it shouldn’t be taken at face value. In 2011, she dressed for the Met Ball in the window of Barneys in New York, the same year that she designed a diamond-encrusted glove with the jeweler Shaun Leane, which she modeled while lying, as if in death, in the entrance of art dealer Jay Jopling’s London house. It’s no surprise the gossip columns pick like vultures over her lifestyle, her outré way of dressing and her on-and-off love affair with married French philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy. Are they still together? "It’s the same old giddy mess,” she says, “I don’t know what’s going to happen…” Her sentence drifts off into hand gestures and grimaces.

Now that the exhibition is up and running (Guinness has also created the Isabella Blow Foundation, with Blow’s closest friend, milliner Philip Treacy, among others, to fund students at Central Saint Martins college), she is focusing on music, “laying down an album” and a future free from grief. “Do you know, Lee had got into Goldsmiths before he died? He was going to do an art course.” She stops. “I so wish they were still here.” A tear runs down her face. “Issy was the first person to make me smile. Our grandparents nearly married. But I don’t want to become the poster-child for fashion suicide, it’s not a good place to be. I need to live my life, not everybody else’s death.”
Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! Nov 20-March 2;somersethouse.org.uk; isabellablowfoundation.com

net-a-porter

 

[MartiniKiss]

zimbio.com

 

[MartiniKiss]

zimbio.com

 

[Morphe]

Will she lose those tacky f**king shoes, goddamn!!!!

 

[Not Plain Jane]

The Net-a-Porter shots are nice, and the video is ... er ... stylish, if a tad slow...

 

[Gaultier_Bandit]

She used to be innately cool and stylish. Now it seems like she tries to hard (contacts really )....almost Gaga gimmicky!

 

[Not Plain Jane]

^ I thought similar looking through the thread last evening. It's kind of become cliche now, this look. I wish she'd stretch her style chops a bit more.

 

[misspistol]

I can't believe how boring I find her now Also, I HATE that she says she thinks she blends in and nobody notices her. She knows that's not true!

 

[MartiniKiss]

dailymail.co.uk

 

[Morphe]

She SERIOUSLY needs to get rid of these godawful shoes.

 

[Nymphaea]

Those shoes are horrible, maybe she uses them to kind of work out?

 

[LUXXX]

Anyone know what brand her headphones are?

 

[KKnardi]

^ wow. that's amazing. She wears those shoes out in New York on the streets, in the cold...

 

[Laini]

Anyone know what brand her headphones are?

Marshall.

 

[anina]

Thanks for the fast ID, Laini!

 

[GIVENCHYlover]

Wow, that's a serious appearance

 

[LUXXX]

Marshall.

Thank you! I love the style... so chic.