Daphne Guinness

[eternitygoddess]

she could give dita von teese a run for her money.

[pucci_mama]

^ Agreed. Dita seems like she tries hard for Daphne it just looks so natural.. you could imagine her looking pristine even on her 'off' days. Even though my personal aesthetic and hers could not be further apart (apart from the love of black) I respect her for sticking with it 100%.


Chewsteraghi I know.. I love that quote :

"When I see someone else with it, I don't want it anymore..it's done."

[jackieonassis]

She has the greatest cheekbones!

[bluejeans]

Originally Posted by Miss Dalloway

Now that is a hot coat,but not everyone could pull it off thats for sure.

And i will go over my old stack of Vogue's in the next few days(when i get the time to)but i think it was probably September issue with SJP on the cover,and i dont have that one anymore.

could this be the article youre thinking of?

lithe spirit; With her uniquely whimsical sense of style, the oh-so-slim taste- and moviemaker Daphne Guinness is a fashion designer's dream.

Publication: Vogue
Publication Date: 01-APR-05
Author: Bowles, Hamish

Daphne Guinness has laid waste to her fitting room at Christian Lacroix's Parisian haute couture salon, as befits a woman whose latest style icon is Lord Nelson. "I have such a uniform fetish-isn't it terrible?" laughs Guinness, 36. "I love the idea of having a sword and a uniform and medals and ribbons and clambering onto a horse. And that hat! And maybe a patch over one eye!"

The delightfully madcap Guinness

hasn't dressed here since Lacroix's debut in 1987, when, as the nineteen-year-old bride of Spyros Niarchos, scion of the Greek shipping billionaire Stavros, she added one of the designer's signature pouf dresses (a piebald-pony bustier above a bubble of caramel satin) to her trousseau. This afternoon she appears to be making up for lost time. Her second-skin Chanel black pants and short-sleeved Prada black cashmere sweater (that looks-like so many of her things-as though it might have been bought in the children's department) lie inside-out on the floor; the chased-silver platforms that her dear friend Christian Louboutin designed specially for her (and that add six and three-quarter inches to her dainty five feet five) are tumbled nearby; a Lanvin star-burst brooch (Guinness delights in mixing very good jewels with imaginative costume pieces) has lost a stone in a fall to the ground, and she has whipped off her Valentino custard taffeta shirt with such alacrity that one of its covered buttons has popped off and is bobbing along the floor among the fabric swatch cards. These she is consulting with a view to exercising her own interventions on the designer's masterworks, something she has been doing since her haute couture debut, when she worked with Marc Bohan at Dior to concoct her dream wedding gown-a Tissot confection of bustled Brittany lace. "She makes me her own," says Alexander McQueen simply, and she has worn that designer's wildest Givenchy couture fantasias as well as his most rigorous tailored pieces with equal aplomb. "I like the really show-offy pieces; I always do!" says Guinness. "The first time I saw her," says Amanda Harlech, "I didn't believe anybody could be so full on and yet so completely controlled."

Today, Guinness's practiced hands move through the textile morsels like a bank teller's through dollar bills, so that her pigeon's-blood nail varnish appears to create scarlet confetti in the air around her. Here is the consummate professional at work. "Working with designers is fun-coming up with ideas," says Guinness. "normally one gets an obsession about a color, or a look, or a silhouette, and I'll run off and find the person I think might be able to put that together-sometimes it ends up being part of a line; sometimes it just ends up being on me-which is great!" Guinness is extraordinarily well read on the history of costume and fashion; she can, for instance, tell you the finely nuanced differences between Huntsman's gentlemen's evening suits from 1925 and 1929-in fact, she's ordered them both for herself, to the bemusement of that august Savile Row establishment. This exquisite wraith is so slim that she can slip effortlessly into the model dresses (which she can then acquire at comparatively favorable rates-if the designers haven't already earmarked them for their archives).

The youngest child of Lord Moyne, "Daphne's got this incredible taste coming at her from all sides," says decorator Peter Dunham, who has known Guinness since she was an enchanting, independent little girl leading the life "of a Gerald Durrell book, always scurrying about collecting beetles" in the family's vacation house-a seventeenth-century monastery at Cadaques on the Spanish coast near Barcelona. Guinness grew up as the youngest of five siblings who "are all quite flamboyant and eccentric," notes Dunham. "They are as close as you could get to a family in an Evelyn Waugh novel-absolutely Brideshead." Guinness's eldest half-sister, Catherine, was Andy Warhol's amanuensis for years. "The Guinnesses are a law unto themselves," says the distinguished art historian John Richardson. "They have a kind of ability to make their eccentricity flower in some way."

And Guinness's cosmopolitan mother, Suzanne, "grew up in Paris. Very, very slim and well dressed," says her daughter. "I think it was a big influence." And her paternal grandmother was Diana, Lady Mosley, one of the Mitford sisters, a heart-stopping beauty who notoriously divorced Guinness's poet grandfather to marry Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of Britain's Fascist Party in the thirties. "I don't know if I've taken anything from her," says Guinness of Mosley's rigorous chic, although she does occasionally marcel-wave her hair in imitation of the William Acton drawings of her grandmother and Mitford great-aunts.

[bluejeans]

2nd half.

Guinness's collecting instincts soon moved on from bugs to fashion. Guinness's nanny would take her to the Art Deco Rainbow Room at Biba, only a stone's throw from her family's ravishing eighteenth-century London town house, for strawberry milkshakes after school-"a really early turn-on to fashion." Here, among the potted palms and the flamingos, Guinness's passion for birds and feathers was born. "We joke that we can find her in London," says Valentino, "by just following the plumes scattered on the ground." India Hicks remembers a teenage visit to Guinness at boarding school where she was overawed by the thoroughly grown-up contents of her friend's closets. "I was in Mickey Mouse T-shirts, but there was pink cashmere in her wardrobe-the height of sophistication," Hicks says. "We were deeply into fashion," Guinness confirms, "and I had the messiest room, that's for sure, because I was always trying to figure out what to wear for the weekend!" Guinness flirted with punky and Goth looks from Kensington Market, and she attributes her passion for Gothic effects-currently visible in wristfuls of skull-and-crossbone bangles-to her Cadaques bedroom, set in the house's chapel in full view of its altar. From Ken Market, Guinness grew up fast-and into Alaia and Chanel. Christian Louboutin's memory of meeting a fifteen-year-old Guinness remains vivid. "She had on Dior's black suede spencer with gold shells on it and a very very mini skirt and very very high heels with dark stockings. I said, 'I love your jacket.' And she said, 'It's old,' which I later understood to mean last season. On the way to the restaurant she started singing Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with a magnificent voice. Then she started singing a Wagner opera in fluent German. I thought, This is a phenomenon!"

In the low-profile days of her marriage, and motherhood-the Niarchoses have three almost alarmingly handsome and self-possessed children-Guinness was engaged by fashion, "entirely for her own personal enjoyment," says Philip Treacy, who has been creating hats and fantastical headdresses for her for twelve years. From her first visit, Treacy was struck by Guinness's "completely original perspective. She was always interested in the sort of things that regular clients wouldn't touch with a barge pole! She just thought they were completely normal . . . and she could carry off that better than anybody else-it always looked right. She's not trying to be avant-garde; she just is!" "She can wear the most extraordinary things," Richardson says, "things that would turn anyone else into a fashion victim. She transcends chic in some amazing stratosphere of her own."

Guinness-who has ambitions as an actress and singer-is currently producing movie shorts with fashion photographer turned moviemaker Sean Ellis (2004's Cashback has won awards at five film festivals around the world). She has also used that edge as a fashion editor, alongside Isabella Blow at Tatler. Blow first noticed her at the marchioness of Dufferin and Ava's "Tiaras will be worn" ninetieth-birthday party in 1997. Guinness was "wearing piled-up feathers in her hair-very Marie-Antoinette but very modern-and floating black chiffon revealing those thin legs dancing away like a beautiful grasshopper." In a room filled with the glittering great and the good, "she was the only person there who had elegance and a bit of funk going on at the same time," Blow remembers. "We became friends through a passion for clothes. The unique thing about Daffers is her obsessiveness, and the themes-themes of the week, themes of the month, inspired by something she's seen or read-she's extremely well read; the Nancy Mitford blood comes out. . . . There's a rock-'n'-roll Daphne and then there's a Jackie O Daphne. Then there's a more ethereal, transparent one. . . ."

One of Guinness's enduring themes is a passion for the eighteenth century; chez Chanel she ordered a pale-gray wool Barry Lyndon suit with ivory tulle engageantes at the wrist, and liked the effect so much she had the same thing made longer in black as a coat. She is also mad for jabots and bits of airy nonsense at the neck. And for sleeves that veil the hands-and for massed rings twinkling beneath them. "she's always sprinkled with her cosmos of diamonds," says Harlech, laughing. "Details are very important," says Guinness, "even if no one else knows the detail's there apart from you. It's the same for clothing, jewelry, houses, pictures." Guinness's passion for detail will soon be manifest in the jewel-box fashion-and-art emporium that she is opening with her brother Sebastian in Paris's Galerie Vero-Dodat, a few paces from Christian Louboutin's store, "dedicated to things that engage me; to what I think is cool for that month."

She was photographed for Vogue beneath the Gainsboroughs and Reynoldses at Kenwood House, the sublime Adam mansion that her great-great-grandfather Sir Edward Guinness, the first Earl of Iveagh, bought to save from suburban developers and soon after bequeathed to the nation, replete with his superb collection of British art from the eighteenth century that so inspires his descendant. The Guinnesses, whose family fortunes were established in the mid-eighteenth century in banking and brewing (seven and a half million glasses of the eponymous family's frothing black brew are downed daily), evidently believe in the grand gesture.

With her lint-white face, dramatic cheekbones, and badger-striped hair, and her wistful, dreaming air, as though she were carefully tending a secret melancholy, Guinness could have stepped from a Gainsborough canvas herself. "She's like Tinkerbell," notes Harlech, "like thistledown, gossamer; if you try and catch her she'll just fly away . . . if you hug her she'll break in two."

"My life is surreal. I think things that are normal for me are abnormal for anybody else!" concurs Guinness, who credits this to her childhood "growing up around Surrealists" in Cadaques, where Dali, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp encamped and where an impressionable Guinness was entranced by "the lobsters in Dali's pool!" Guinness's youthful marriage into the famously secretive and protective Niarchos clan, with its unimagined resources of wealth and power, can only have heightened her unique detachment from the humdrum. This is inclined to manifest itself in sibylline pronouncements-"I like couture because it's sort of the beginning and the end," she will say, or "I'm very schizophrenic-sometimes I want to look like a nun . . . and sometimes not!"

Guinness and her children recently moved from the jagged Art Deco glamour of her Manhattan home to a handsome London mansion. "I wanted it to be a comfortable refuge," says Guinness. To this end she worked with Robert Kime-who counts the prince of Wales and the duke of Beaufort among his discerning clients-to concoct interiors that evoke the effortless, fascinating charm of the legendary Guinness houses: Osbaston, another of her childhood homes; her uncle Desmond's Leixlip Castle; her grandfather's Biddesden; and her grandmother's exquisite Temple de la Gloire outside Paris, among many others. At home, Guinness deftly marries her achingly nostalgic tastes to a dashing sense of modernity. Among the Bloomsbury portraits and the High Victorian nudes Guinness hangs bold Brit Art-the Chapman Brothers, Grayson Perry, and a scintillating Damien Hirst canvas, shimmering with the iridescence of thousands of exotic butterflies.

Upstairs, an allee of closets runs the width of the house but proves inadequate to its task; an imposing guest bedroom is already subsumed to a chaos of crowded rolling racks and pyramidal stacks of couture dress cartons from the rue Cambon. They recall the giddy fashion mania of Aileen Plunket (also descended from the first Earl of Iveagh), one of three glamorous Guinness sisters who dazzled thirties society. Maureen Dufferin and Ava was another; Guinness girls have ever delighted to epater le bourgeois. "Maureen was a terrible old camp," remembers Richardson. "She told me that she bought all her shoes in the Miami airport as it was the only place she could find high heels with goldfish in them!" The Givenchy-clad Plunket, meanwhile, was rumored to have flown to Paris (in the days when that was still an adventure) expressly to have her eyelashes curled by the famous Monsieur Alexandre.

Evoking the quirky style of those distant Guinness cousins and her style icons, the willowy Nancy Cunard and Daisy Fellowes, Daphne Guinness's closets are crowded with coruscating beaded flapper dresses and drawers filled with feathered or sequined shoulder capes-serendipitous vintage finds or couture treasures from Chanel and Valentino. Her heroes include such designers as Galliano, Gaultier, Lagerfeld, and McQueen. "I've got absolutely no plan at all about fashion; it's completely organic," says Guinness, who mixes up these grandees with young Turks including Rick Owens, Gardem, Hamish Morrow, Roland Mouret, and Cosa Nostra.

"You are no longer a person; you are a concept!" her friend, the French writer Bernard-Henri Levy told her playfully. But beneath the glinting-diamond facade "there is something of the lyric Irish in her," as Harlech notes.

"I'm usually terrified of ultrachic people," says Richardson. "They are hard and sharp and so hard to touch. But she's soft and silky and lovable-and loving, for that matter."

http://www.accessmylibrary.com

[Love$2shop]

India, thank you so much for PMing me the pictures.


Thank you so much everyone for keeping this thread alive (esp. Miss D!!!).


PucciMama, I saw that documentary as well! Great film. Definitely worth seeing.



I think she loooks amazing in this picture:

Daphne @ Chanel.jpg

credit: taken from the Vogue scan posted earlier in this thread.

[Party_Vixen]

^ Such a beautiful picture .

And what a great article. I'm going to use one of the quotes as my signature .

[Miss Dalloway]

Originally Posted by bluejeans

could this be the article youre thinking of?

Yesss thats it,there was one picture of her in the Kenwood house and few candids,LOVE what Isabella Blow said about her.

You are all welcome for the pictures.

[LetThemEatCake]

Courtney Love wore the same Lanvin dress that she's wearing in #86. I like Daphne, a lot, just wonder how old she is?

[Party_Vixen]

^ I believe she's 38. Turning 39 this year.

[AnaisF]

She has such amazing and eclectic style!

[Miss Dalloway]

Originally Posted by Party_Vixen

^ I believe she's 38. Turning 39 this year.

She is 40 years old,according to that latest Uk Vogue article.

[Hanne]

Originally Posted by LetThemEatCake

Courtney Love wore the same Lanvin dress that she's wearing in #86. I like Daphne, a lot, just wonder how old she is?

see post #95

01-APR-05
Author: Bowles, Hamish

Daphne Guinness has laid waste to her fitting room at Christian Lacroix's Parisian haute couture salon, as befits a woman whose latest style icon is Lord Nelson. "I have such a uniform fetish-isn't it terrible?" laughs Guinness, 36.

So she should be about 38 - 39 now..

[bluejeans]

here's the short film cashback by sean ellis which daphne produced. she also appears briefly in the film. enjoy!

Cashback (2004)
Writer : Sean Ellis
Director : Sean Ellis
Executive Producer : Daphne Guinness
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?...arch&plindex=6

[bluejeans]

and here is the documentary featuring daphne (part of which was posted earlier in the thread) in it's entirety. i'm in love with her accent, there's such intelligence behind it. this woman is just amazing!

The Secret World of Haute Couture (2007)
Director : Margy Kinmouth

part 1 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih6SITik-40

part 2 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6eTs0ZUcXQ

part 3 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ5_SItMt6w

part 4 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JCPqATtSyY

part 5 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQU93nVs8Uo

part 6 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9YMhmV9SYc