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