Jasmine Guinness in bloom: Model, designer and society beauty
17 Jul 2009
As her new clothing range launches Jasmine Guinness talks to Lucy Cavendish about what it’s really like being part of Ireland’s most famous family.
She grew up in a castle, married her childhood sweetheart and has found success as a model, designer and toyshop owner – life seems to be one long fairytale for Jasmine Guinness.
I am sitting in a beautiful but cluttered flat on the King's Road in London, which looks almost as if it has been transported from Provence. There are paintings all over the ochre walls, and fruit bowls and used candles on every surface. Sunlight streams through the windows. Jasmine Guinness – model, toyshop owner, fashion designer and scion of a famous family – is perched on a wooden chair in the kitchen having her make-up done.
Wearing faded purple skinny jeans, a blue cardigan with sequins embroidered on it and black trainers with green laces, she looks like a teenager. But then I watch her change, moment by moment, from this trendy young thing into someone else entirely. Without make-up she is pretty; with it she suddenly transforms into something quite intriguing. She has a face like a cat – wide, open with slanting eyes – porcelain-coloured skin and irises the colour of sapphires. Her dark hair is almost perma-waved, reminiscent of her great-grandmother Diana Mitford.
Jasmine is the daughter of the writer Patrick Guinness and his first wife, Liz Casey, a village girl he met growing up on the family estate in Ireland. Her grandfather, Desmond, who owns this London flat, is the younger brother of Jonathan, the current Lord Moyne.
She is related to the fashion maverick Daphne Guinness through her father's side (Daphne's father is Jonathan), but Daphne is the generation above her. 'There are loads of us, aren't there?' she says, in clear-cut English tones. 'People always assume we are all very rich. They talk about me as if I am the sole inheritor of the entire Guinness family fortune and worth masses, but I have hundreds of cousins and half-siblings and that's just our side of the family!'
As if to prove her point, a young blonde-haired girl called Violet appears at the door. 'I didn't tidy up!' she says, her hands flying to her mouth. 'Why didn't you tell me you were coming?' It turns out that Violet, who is Guinness's cousin, is living in the flat. Her father is the photographer Perry Ogden who, Guinness tells me, was the reason why she went into modelling in the first place.
'I was living in Ireland and Perry needed two girls to model clothes for a Laura Ashley campaign. He asked me and my best friend, Zita Lloyd, and we loved it! He gave us £50 a day and I got my mother a satin heart with i love you mum on it. She still has it and I was only eight then – I'm 32 now. Can you imagine how faded it is?'
It's a sweet story, I tell her, doubly so as quite soon after that Guinness's parents split up and went off to 'find themselves', as she puts it. 'My parents went away to grow up and live their own lives and do all the things they missed out on because they had me so young. Only now that I am a parent myself do I realise how heartbreaking it must've been for them to leave me. My mother had me when she was 17, and she wanted to travel and work and discover herself. She'd met my dad because he lived at one end of Leixlip village and she lived at the other. Only 800 people lived there so they both wanted to go and see more of the world. They asked me what I wanted to do and I told them I wished to stay in Ireland with my grandparents. I had my dog there and my pony, so… it all made sense to me.'
She says she sees her parents as much as she can. 'My mother lives in Spain and has another child, a girl. My father, who is now an author and historian, came back to live in Ireland. He remarried and had four more children. I love them all and feel very blessed to have ended up having such a huge family.'
On the mantelpiece of the comfortable drawing-room, full of paintings of horses and faded cushions, stand many old and slightly tatty photographs. There's one of a piercingly blue-eyed, grey-haired man with bushy eyebrows standing in front of an imposing house. Next to him is a younger Jasmine, maybe in her twenties, holding a little baby on a pretty pony. 'That's me with my eldest son, Elwood,' she says. 'He's seven now, can you believe it? That's my grandfather, Desmond. We're standing outside Leixlip.'
Leixlip Castle is where she grew up. Her grandfather bought it as a wreck and has, Guinness says, painstakingly restored it. 'He's a very charitable man. He buys run-down houses of historical importance and restores them and gives them to the nation.It's what inspires him.' Desmond and his first wife Mariga, the late Princess Marie Gabrielle of Urach, devoted much of their lives to preserving Irish architecture of all periods. They founded the Irish Georgian Society in 1958 and Desmond has since bought and restored many properties, including Castletown House in Kildare, which is the finest example of Palladian architecture in Ireland.
I ask Guinness whether her surname has helped her or hindered her. 'People have always assumed that I am privileged,' she says. 'And that has been a problem sometimes. When I first started modelling and I was schlepping around London with no money, I found it rather irksome that people thought I had a private income when I didn't.' I point out that she did grow up in a castle. 'Yes, but my parents had a tiny whitewashed cottage in the grounds of the house. It was lovely, roses round the door, but not exactly palatial. I only moved into the castle itself with my grandparents when they left.'
For the past two and a half years she has been running a toyshop called Honeyjam with her friend Honey Bowdrey (Guinness's nickname is Jam). It is in the trendy, bohemian Portobello Road in London, and sells traditional children's toys. 'Lots of other shops nearby have closed down, including a toyshop, but ours is going from strength to strength,' she says, beaming.
She still models from time to time, but her latest project, and the one she is very excited about, is a range of clothes she has designed for
Very.co.uk, a new shopping website backed by Littlewoods Shop Direct Group. 'I was asked to do some pieces,' says Guinness, 'and I was so thrilled. When I was a model I'd spend ages watching designers putting together the clothes. I always found it fascinating, the little tucks here and a tweak there. It has been amazing to be able to put it all into practice.'
She takes me up the creaky, rickety stairs to a cluttered bedroom full of shoes and clothes. There is a long black evening dress with a rose motif on it hanging up on the door. Next to it is a lovely printed tea dress shot with green. 'Ta da!' says Guinness, showing them to me. 'This,' she says, holding up a beautiful but useful black dress, 'is based on a dress I bought in New York when I was 19.' She holds up a blue tea dress with purple stars on it. She has little jackets, full skirts, a red and black satin prom dress. They all appear to be hugely wearable. Each piece will retail at between £40 and £70.
She tells me that she prefers designing to modelling. 'It's really hard work being a model,' she says. 'I remember when I told Jerry [Hall] that was what I wanted to do, and she said, "I'm sure you'll be great at it, honey, but it's not easy." I thought she was protesting too much, but then, a few months later, I found myself going all over for castings and no one wanted me.'
She started getting work eventually. 'I did the Joseph campaign and that really kick-started my career. After that I went all over the world, so it did feel glamorous.' She also made friends with Jade Parfitt, with whom she set up the Clothesline charity, which helps Third World children born to Aids sufferers.
'Jade started modelling at 15,' she says. 'I was 19, so I felt really old.' She says that she was always called curvaceous back then. 'I was a size eight bottom and a 10 on top. I've never had any bum or hips but I was thought to be a "bigger" person. Now the girls have got even thinner and it's not good.'
She downsized on her commitments when she became pregnant by the fashion-shoot organiser and producer Gawain Rainey, a childhood friend who is now her husband. Somehow, everything goes back to her childhood. When she talks about it, it all sounds so free and unfettered and romantic that I can hardly imagine her living here in north-west London with Rainey and their two children (Elwood's brother, Otis, is three). Rainey is a nephew of Lord Harlech and he would sometimes appear at Leixlip. 'I like the fact that I have known Gawain nearly all my life,' she says.
They got together when Guinness was in her early twenties and she became pregnant unexpectedly quickly. 'I hadn't intended to,' she says. After Elwood was born Guinness and Rainey separated for a period. 'We were young and we wanted to be friends and we weren't quite sure what else we were going to be.' Guinness went back to Leixlip and, six months later, was reunited with Rainey. 'I missed him,' she says simply. 'He missed me.' They eventually married, in Ireland, three years ago. 'I don't spend as much time as I'd like in Ireland,' she says. 'I only get there twice a year or so, but I am Irish, right to my soul.'
She's very keen on her children having a similar childhood to her own. 'I was outside all day. I had a cow called Daisy and a pig called Cynthia as pets. They got eaten eventually and I was distraught. My children are different. Elwood wants to play on the computer all the time. Otis likes being out, though.'
When you talk to Jasmine Guinness, life seems a relatively uncomplicated place for her. She doesn't appear to do anxiety, depression or dark moments of the soul, which, in a way, makes it seem as if nothing has ever gone wrong for her. She seems to glide happily over the surface, smiling as she goes. It's not that she has had a charmed life. Her mother developed a terrible drink problem and was helped out of alcoholism by Marianne Faithfull. She also spent hardly any time as a child with her own parents. 'I didn't mind,' she says. 'I loved life at Leixlip. You could be sitting next to Mick Jagger at dinner one day and a plumber the next. It's helped me understand more about life.'
I think Guinness is just good at playing down the bad things and playing up the good. For example, just recently she got into hot water over a programme she did on Irish television – an Irish version of
Who Do You Think You Are? – when she said she was proud of her family. 'It concentrated on some things my family did in the famine,such as buying up land cheaply from people who were emigrating, but it didn't show any of the good things,' she says. 'And I am proud of my family. It's the 250th anniversary of Guinness, and what people didn't see was that the Guinnesses also had a long history of charity work and were good employers. They provided houses, schools and health care for their workers. There is nothing to be ashamed of.'
She tosses her head defiantly. 'That's what I feel increasingly about my life,' she says. 'In my twenties I was obsessed with what other people thought of me. In my thirties it's about my children, my husband, my work. In my forties, it's going to be about me and I shan't care what anyone else thinks. I can't wait!'
