Daphne Guinness
publication date: Feb 23, 2011
Daphne Guinness walks in to the café of a West London art gallery and all heads turn. She is certainly quite extraordinary looking. She is terribly tiny, like a little fledgling bird, with thin little legs balancing on top of sky scraper heels. She is wearing virtually spayed-on black latex leggings, a Regency-esque shirt with a tall collar and long sleeves that she designed herself for the Dover Street Market label, a black Balmain jacket with pointy shoulder pads that looks as if it is out of Star Trek, deep red nail varnish, funky sunglasses and huge amounts of glittery diamante jewelry.
She sighs as she sits down, her delicate face falling in sadness.
‘Love is agony, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘I’ve been involved with someone for some time now but it’s all so complicated. It’s never straightforward is it? You meet someone, you fall in love, it’s the most wonderful thing ever but…there’s always something that’s not quite right about love isn’t there?’
She is, I think, referring to the French philosopher Bernard Henri Levy. He once told her, ‘you are no longer a person, you have become a concept.’ Guinness has been rumoured to have been seeing him for a few years now and although she doesn’t refer to him directly, the couple have been reportedly spotted out and about in New York together, where Daphne Guinness now lives. But Henri Levy is married to the French actress Arielle Dombasie and they are considered a celebrity couple in their homeland.
‘There is no hope,’ says Guinness. She gets up and goes to the café counter and asks for a Red Bull.
‘No Red Bull,’ she says plaintively. Then she sits down again.
‘I must see the good in this. Everything is a leaning experience so…I’ll learn.’
It turns out that she has spent the last decade or so of her life learning. Ever since she and her husband, Spyros Niarchos, son of uber-rich shipping magnate Stavros, split up (they divorced in 1999) she has had to make her own way in the world. Before that she was part of the Guinness dynasty, then the Niarchos protectorate to-ing and fro-ing on private jets and yachts with her husband and their three children, and now she is plain 41 year-old Daphne Guinness.
Only nothing about Daphne Guinness is plain.
She is a rather exotic creature really, inhabiting the kind of fashionable bohemian world where everyone is creating something all the time. In her world, people like Karl Lagerfeld Twitter that ‘florals are for middle-aged women with a weight problem.’ In Daphne Guinness land, people do wear black leather high-heeled platform boots, as she does, and think they can walk in them. She knows endless photographers, including David LaChapelle and Steven Klein and has been know to work with and encourage many designers such as Gareth Pugh who said of her, ‘she’s an iconic fashion-forward thinking kind of a person’. Consequently, because of her glamorous connections and contacts, she is at every launch, every fashion show, every party almost worldwide.
Yet there must be something that edges her above others of her ilk of which there are a few. In fact, I was at a lunch party the other day and a woman I could have sworn was Daphne Guinness walked in. She looked exactly the same as her with her blonde hair and sharply tailored clothes and yet it wasn’t Daphne Guinness. It was someone else. Imagine that!
Daphne Guinness barely flinches when I tell her this.
‘I should think a lot of people look like me,’ she says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘They don’t’
‘Don’t they?’ she said looking surprised.
She then goes on to tell me that she has no idea how odd-looking she is.
‘I can’t see it,’ she says when I ask her how she feels when all heads turn to look at her. ‘I’m just not aware of this.’
So what is it that makes Guinness special? No one really knows exactly what she does, but everyone knows who she is. It’s not just her look – even though her blonde and black skunk-like hair is her trademark. ‘I never meant it to be like this,’ she says, tugging on it a bit. ‘I just glue bits on to it and this is how it turns out.’ It’s the range of pies she has her fingers in. In the past she went to the Slade to study art, nearly became an opera singer, dabbled in writing and became obsessed with classical music. She is described as being a designer, stylist, writer, film-maker, collector and now a perfumer. In Guinness-world, people like her don’t just create a perfume, but they also make a film to accompany it. ‘I think mostly in visuals,’ she says as way of explanation.
Her scent, called Daphne, is something she has created in collaboration with Comme Des Garcons. I ask her if it smells the way she does. To me, she smells of patchouli oil and incense sticks maybe burning in a church.
‘Yes that’s it!’ she says. ‘I love the smell of churches and of clay and moss. I like earthy smells. I love amber and tuberose.’
She first started making perfume for herself by experimenting with essential oils mixed with an alcohol base.
‘I just couldn’t find anything I liked,’ she says, ‘so I thought I’d make my own. I’m willful in that way.’
She tells me that she has always been willful. ‘I married at 19,’ she says. ‘That’s young isn’t it?’
It was partially, she says, because she wasn’t that bothered about school but mostly because she fell in love.
‘It was madness,’ she says, ‘but that’s love for you. I was headstrong and very much in love and I couldn’t see any reason not to marry.’
After this came what is commonly called (by friends and family) her ‘Faberge egg’ years.
‘I think that’s a bit strong,’ she protests mildly. ‘But it’s true I didn’t get out very much. We were either traveling or I was being a mother. Then again, I needed to get over my family so I did what I had to do…’ She and Niarchos travelled the world accompanied by bodyguards everywhere they went.
‘It was St Tropez one day, a yacht the next and then New York, Paris.’
The upshot of this was that she didn’t really keep in touch with anyone. In fact, when she and Niarchos split up, she claims not to have seen her friends and family for 15 years.
‘Suddenly I had to start all over again and it was very frightening. It was like coming out of a time capsule. I found, at that time, that fashion became an extension of self.’
She’d never had a job or earned her own money. ‘I wasn’t even that well-educated,’ she says. ‘I spent my years reading books obsessively. I love books and classical music and politics. In fact I love everything but sport. I find everything but that interesting.’
Yet it is almost impossible to pin down exactly what Daphne Guinness actually does. She herself says she does ‘ideas’.
‘I think of things and then I tell my friends and they create them.’
What type of things, I ask her.
‘Oh, I thought of these shoes and now my friend makes them. I am good at seeing what will happen next in fashion. I might think that armour is a good trend.’ She has a real thing for armour and cites Nelson as a fashion hero of hers. She also loves the romanticism of Lord Byron and 18th century dandy Beau Brummell..
And what friends she has made! She met fashion editor and general icon Issy Blow at her cousin, Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava’s, 90th birthday party. .Blow, who committed suicide in 2007, took to her because she was wearing a hat shaped like a cathedral on her head. The two became firm friends and used to help each other out on fashion shoots. ‘I loved her,’ Guinness says of Blow. ‘I miss her every day. I cannot believe she is not here. She was so generous and so very funny.’ She was also friends with Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records, who died in 2006 and knew Andy Warhol. ‘My sister Catherine worked for him. He was very shy but very dry.’
In fact, she seems to know absolutely everyone. When she was growing up her father, the brewery heir Jonathan Guinness and her mother, renowned French beauty Suzanne Lisney, used to holiday in their 18th centure monastery in Cadaques in Spain. Most of her summers here were spent hanging out with Dali, Duchamp, Man Ray and Ricahrd Hamilton.
‘It’s such a beautiful place,’ she says of Cadaques. ‘There’s one road in to the town. Virtually no tourism and lots of interesting people.’ As a child, though, she had no real concept of who Man Ray was. ‘I just thought he was our neighbour,’ she says.
She is one of many inter-related siblings in her family. ‘I have a brother Sebastian who lives in Cadaques now but I also have six half brothers and sisters.’ Her father, who now lives in Gloucestershire and who she says she is ‘very close to’, had three children with his first wife, Daphne and Sebastian with Suzanne (who died two years ago of lung cancer) and three further children with his English mistress.
‘Complicated,’ says Guinness. ‘We are an interesting family that way.’
Her grandmother, on her father’s side, was Diana Mitford whose second husband was Sir Oswald Mosely, the anti-semitic head of the British Union for Fascists. ‘I While Diana was alive, I never read any books about her. Every time I do now, I feel horrified for what I read seems to different to the person I knew. I have spent my life trying to piece together that puzzle. I wish I could figure it out.’
She says she wasn’t really aware of what her step-grandfather was involved in until he died. ‘I was 13 and it was on the news. I was bullied at school after that but, my grandmother fell in love with him. Yet, for me, she was unbelievably nice, warm, friendly and most extraordinary. She was the biggest influence in my life so I find it all very complicated and very sad.’
In fact, Guinness says she has spent her last few years trying to become more active in discouraging racism and deprivation of any kind. ‘I can’t understand it when people are close-minded. I mean, boy have I made mistakes and been very wrong. I can’t tell you the amounts of times I’ve been let down but I still try to see the best in people. My aim is to help people in desperate situations. I spend my life telling myself there is surely more I can do.’ In April 2008, she auctioned 1000 of her designer clothes and raised $158,000 for the charity Womankind that deals with political and domestic abuse of women world wide.
‘I wanted to sell those dresses,’ she says. ‘They represented a part of my life that I’m not proud of. I don’t want to go in to it more than that. I just thought that if I could use them to make other people happy, it might readdress the nightmare.’
At the moment though she feels as if she is drifting somewhat. After her divorce, she bought a huge house in St John’s Wood but she sold it recently. ‘My eldest son is in his second year at Yale. When my other two children are not at boarding school, they are with their father in New York. I miss them but I look at them now with astonishment and pride. They are open and wonderful.’ She has bought an apartment on fifth avenue to be near them. ‘I am here and there and everywhere,’ she says.
She then tells me that, a few years ago, she tried to buy her London childhood home again back. As she talks about it, I realize that the house she grew up in is the house I also spent my teenage years and onwards inhabiting.
‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Your father bought it from my father!’
She then goes on to describe the house in minute detail, from the nursery at the top to the swing in the back garden..
‘I lived up the top of the house and stuffed toys up the chimney. When I went to view it, they were still there!’
She then looks really upset.
‘I loved that house,’ she says.
She tells me before I leave her that her life is like slipping on banana skins. ‘You can’t be objective about your life, can you? Life is full of banana skins. You slip, you carry on. I have to look forward you see, not back. There lies madness.’
The weird thing is, after we have parted, I still smell of her for ages. I keep getting whiffs of her in my car and on a paper napkin I had put in my bag and my only concluson is that Daphne Guinness is just a person who lingers. Everything about her is memorable; not just this powerful smell of patchouli but her low and level voice, her serious hazel eyes her rather delicate prettiness. And, as I drive home, I think of her there in that house we both knew so well, in that rather small and remote top room with all those bars on the windows stuffing her cuddly toys up the chimney and it makes me feel a bit sad for her. I’m just not sure why.
She sighs as she sits down, her delicate face falling in sadness.
‘Love is agony, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘I’ve been involved with someone for some time now but it’s all so complicated. It’s never straightforward is it? You meet someone, you fall in love, it’s the most wonderful thing ever but…there’s always something that’s not quite right about love isn’t there?’
She is, I think, referring to the French philosopher Bernard Henri Levy. He once told her, ‘you are no longer a person, you have become a concept.’ Guinness has been rumoured to have been seeing him for a few years now and although she doesn’t refer to him directly, the couple have been reportedly spotted out and about in New York together, where Daphne Guinness now lives. But Henri Levy is married to the French actress Arielle Dombasie and they are considered a celebrity couple in their homeland.
‘There is no hope,’ says Guinness. She gets up and goes to the café counter and asks for a Red Bull.
‘No Red Bull,’ she says plaintively. Then she sits down again.
‘I must see the good in this. Everything is a leaning experience so…I’ll learn.’
It turns out that she has spent the last decade or so of her life learning. Ever since she and her husband, Spyros Niarchos, son of uber-rich shipping magnate Stavros, split up (they divorced in 1999) she has had to make her own way in the world. Before that she was part of the Guinness dynasty, then the Niarchos protectorate to-ing and fro-ing on private jets and yachts with her husband and their three children, and now she is plain 41 year-old Daphne Guinness.
Only nothing about Daphne Guinness is plain.
She is a rather exotic creature really, inhabiting the kind of fashionable bohemian world where everyone is creating something all the time. In her world, people like Karl Lagerfeld Twitter that ‘florals are for middle-aged women with a weight problem.’ In Daphne Guinness land, people do wear black leather high-heeled platform boots, as she does, and think they can walk in them. She knows endless photographers, including David LaChapelle and Steven Klein and has been know to work with and encourage many designers such as Gareth Pugh who said of her, ‘she’s an iconic fashion-forward thinking kind of a person’. Consequently, because of her glamorous connections and contacts, she is at every launch, every fashion show, every party almost worldwide.
Yet there must be something that edges her above others of her ilk of which there are a few. In fact, I was at a lunch party the other day and a woman I could have sworn was Daphne Guinness walked in. She looked exactly the same as her with her blonde hair and sharply tailored clothes and yet it wasn’t Daphne Guinness. It was someone else. Imagine that!
Daphne Guinness barely flinches when I tell her this.
‘I should think a lot of people look like me,’ she says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘They don’t’
‘Don’t they?’ she said looking surprised.
She then goes on to tell me that she has no idea how odd-looking she is.
‘I can’t see it,’ she says when I ask her how she feels when all heads turn to look at her. ‘I’m just not aware of this.’
So what is it that makes Guinness special? No one really knows exactly what she does, but everyone knows who she is. It’s not just her look – even though her blonde and black skunk-like hair is her trademark. ‘I never meant it to be like this,’ she says, tugging on it a bit. ‘I just glue bits on to it and this is how it turns out.’ It’s the range of pies she has her fingers in. In the past she went to the Slade to study art, nearly became an opera singer, dabbled in writing and became obsessed with classical music. She is described as being a designer, stylist, writer, film-maker, collector and now a perfumer. In Guinness-world, people like her don’t just create a perfume, but they also make a film to accompany it. ‘I think mostly in visuals,’ she says as way of explanation.
Her scent, called Daphne, is something she has created in collaboration with Comme Des Garcons. I ask her if it smells the way she does. To me, she smells of patchouli oil and incense sticks maybe burning in a church.
‘Yes that’s it!’ she says. ‘I love the smell of churches and of clay and moss. I like earthy smells. I love amber and tuberose.’
She first started making perfume for herself by experimenting with essential oils mixed with an alcohol base.
‘I just couldn’t find anything I liked,’ she says, ‘so I thought I’d make my own. I’m willful in that way.’
She tells me that she has always been willful. ‘I married at 19,’ she says. ‘That’s young isn’t it?’
It was partially, she says, because she wasn’t that bothered about school but mostly because she fell in love.
‘It was madness,’ she says, ‘but that’s love for you. I was headstrong and very much in love and I couldn’t see any reason not to marry.’
After this came what is commonly called (by friends and family) her ‘Faberge egg’ years.
‘I think that’s a bit strong,’ she protests mildly. ‘But it’s true I didn’t get out very much. We were either traveling or I was being a mother. Then again, I needed to get over my family so I did what I had to do…’ She and Niarchos travelled the world accompanied by bodyguards everywhere they went.
‘It was St Tropez one day, a yacht the next and then New York, Paris.’
The upshot of this was that she didn’t really keep in touch with anyone. In fact, when she and Niarchos split up, she claims not to have seen her friends and family for 15 years.
‘Suddenly I had to start all over again and it was very frightening. It was like coming out of a time capsule. I found, at that time, that fashion became an extension of self.’
She’d never had a job or earned her own money. ‘I wasn’t even that well-educated,’ she says. ‘I spent my years reading books obsessively. I love books and classical music and politics. In fact I love everything but sport. I find everything but that interesting.’
Yet it is almost impossible to pin down exactly what Daphne Guinness actually does. She herself says she does ‘ideas’.
‘I think of things and then I tell my friends and they create them.’
What type of things, I ask her.
‘Oh, I thought of these shoes and now my friend makes them. I am good at seeing what will happen next in fashion. I might think that armour is a good trend.’ She has a real thing for armour and cites Nelson as a fashion hero of hers. She also loves the romanticism of Lord Byron and 18th century dandy Beau Brummell..
And what friends she has made! She met fashion editor and general icon Issy Blow at her cousin, Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava’s, 90th birthday party. .Blow, who committed suicide in 2007, took to her because she was wearing a hat shaped like a cathedral on her head. The two became firm friends and used to help each other out on fashion shoots. ‘I loved her,’ Guinness says of Blow. ‘I miss her every day. I cannot believe she is not here. She was so generous and so very funny.’ She was also friends with Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records, who died in 2006 and knew Andy Warhol. ‘My sister Catherine worked for him. He was very shy but very dry.’
In fact, she seems to know absolutely everyone. When she was growing up her father, the brewery heir Jonathan Guinness and her mother, renowned French beauty Suzanne Lisney, used to holiday in their 18th centure monastery in Cadaques in Spain. Most of her summers here were spent hanging out with Dali, Duchamp, Man Ray and Ricahrd Hamilton.
‘It’s such a beautiful place,’ she says of Cadaques. ‘There’s one road in to the town. Virtually no tourism and lots of interesting people.’ As a child, though, she had no real concept of who Man Ray was. ‘I just thought he was our neighbour,’ she says.
She is one of many inter-related siblings in her family. ‘I have a brother Sebastian who lives in Cadaques now but I also have six half brothers and sisters.’ Her father, who now lives in Gloucestershire and who she says she is ‘very close to’, had three children with his first wife, Daphne and Sebastian with Suzanne (who died two years ago of lung cancer) and three further children with his English mistress.
‘Complicated,’ says Guinness. ‘We are an interesting family that way.’
Her grandmother, on her father’s side, was Diana Mitford whose second husband was Sir Oswald Mosely, the anti-semitic head of the British Union for Fascists. ‘I While Diana was alive, I never read any books about her. Every time I do now, I feel horrified for what I read seems to different to the person I knew. I have spent my life trying to piece together that puzzle. I wish I could figure it out.’
She says she wasn’t really aware of what her step-grandfather was involved in until he died. ‘I was 13 and it was on the news. I was bullied at school after that but, my grandmother fell in love with him. Yet, for me, she was unbelievably nice, warm, friendly and most extraordinary. She was the biggest influence in my life so I find it all very complicated and very sad.’
In fact, Guinness says she has spent her last few years trying to become more active in discouraging racism and deprivation of any kind. ‘I can’t understand it when people are close-minded. I mean, boy have I made mistakes and been very wrong. I can’t tell you the amounts of times I’ve been let down but I still try to see the best in people. My aim is to help people in desperate situations. I spend my life telling myself there is surely more I can do.’ In April 2008, she auctioned 1000 of her designer clothes and raised $158,000 for the charity Womankind that deals with political and domestic abuse of women world wide.
‘I wanted to sell those dresses,’ she says. ‘They represented a part of my life that I’m not proud of. I don’t want to go in to it more than that. I just thought that if I could use them to make other people happy, it might readdress the nightmare.’
At the moment though she feels as if she is drifting somewhat. After her divorce, she bought a huge house in St John’s Wood but she sold it recently. ‘My eldest son is in his second year at Yale. When my other two children are not at boarding school, they are with their father in New York. I miss them but I look at them now with astonishment and pride. They are open and wonderful.’ She has bought an apartment on fifth avenue to be near them. ‘I am here and there and everywhere,’ she says.
She then tells me that, a few years ago, she tried to buy her London childhood home again back. As she talks about it, I realize that the house she grew up in is the house I also spent my teenage years and onwards inhabiting.
‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Your father bought it from my father!’
She then goes on to describe the house in minute detail, from the nursery at the top to the swing in the back garden..
‘I lived up the top of the house and stuffed toys up the chimney. When I went to view it, they were still there!’
She then looks really upset.
‘I loved that house,’ she says.
She tells me before I leave her that her life is like slipping on banana skins. ‘You can’t be objective about your life, can you? Life is full of banana skins. You slip, you carry on. I have to look forward you see, not back. There lies madness.’
The weird thing is, after we have parted, I still smell of her for ages. I keep getting whiffs of her in my car and on a paper napkin I had put in my bag and my only concluson is that Daphne Guinness is just a person who lingers. Everything about her is memorable; not just this powerful smell of patchouli but her low and level voice, her serious hazel eyes her rather delicate prettiness. And, as I drive home, I think of her there in that house we both knew so well, in that rather small and remote top room with all those bars on the windows stuffing her cuddly toys up the chimney and it makes me feel a bit sad for her. I’m just not sure why.