INTERVIEW:Her family name is a privilege as well as a burden, but it doesn't stop Daphne Guinness from working with some of the most visually creative artists in the world of fashion, she tells
DEIRDRE McQUILLAN
IF THERE’S ONE thing that 42-year-old style icon Daphne Guinness detests, it is being described as a “society heiress”, a label that seems to adhere like flypaper whenever her elfin frame appears in the limelight. Considered one of the world’s best-dressed women, celebrated for her idiosyncratic sartorial choices, her interest in armour and signature black-and-white hairdo, she is also an involuntary standard bearer for her famous surname, one of the most beautiful and high-profile members of that family.
“I never give my last name,” she says when we meet in the Horseshoe Bar in the Shelbourne Hotel on her recent visit to Dublin. Dressed in black latex leggings, black Balmain jacket laden with diamante and trademark white shirt, she cuts a striking monochrome figure. “I am pretty shy. I feel very happy that I like my family, but it has not defined me, but at the same time it is too loaded. I like to take people at face value, but I feel privileged to have had the upbringing that I had and am grateful to my family for that. I would want to enrich the name rather than take from it.”
What she has given her name to recently is a fragrance called Daphne in association with Comme des Garçons, of which more later. The details of her background are well known; the daughter of Jonathan Guinness, the third Lord Moyne, and the French beauty Suzanne Lisney (who died of cancer two years ago), she and her brother Sebastian grew up between Spain, France, England and Ireland. After studying art at London’s Slade School, at 19 she left home to marry Spyros Niarchos, scion of the Greek shipping dynasty, by whom she has three children.
Now divorced, she lives in London and made headlines last year when she sold her haute-couture collection and raised £150,000 for a small charity called Womankind, which is devoted to women in developing countries. Tiny and intense, she possesses a convincing integrity at variance with her more glamorous public profile.
“I didn’t want it to be a tax write-off. Things need to mean something and people always overlook the small charities. is about completing the circle in any way you can without going under. Life has to mean something and the bigger problems in the world are right on your doorstep. It’s trying to get a better synergy in your life,” she says.
Her next project is a book called 15 x 15 with make-up artist turned photographer François Nars, for which all the models will donate their fees to charity.
Her fragrance, a sultry mix of amber, oud and vetiver, is but the latest in a number of collaborations with creative people. It started when Adrian Joffe, who is chief executive of Comme des Garçons Parfum and is married to its designer Rei Kawakubo, admired the fragrance she was wearing and suggested she do one for them. “I had made my own for a long time because I couldn’t find anything that I liked. They broke mine down and rebuilt it.” She had already successfully collaborated with the company on a best-selling collection of white shirts which she designed.
“I like to do things that are classic that you have forever. One thing rolls into the next – it’s like a gallery of missing things I can’t find, like a white shirt.” She is full of praise for Joffe. “He’s married to a visionary, is there to support and encourage, but he’s no fool and understands how to manage artists.”
Guinness leads a busy international life, having just spent three months in LA working on her three-minute movie Mnemosyne, called after the Greek goddess of memory and inspired by the essence of scent. On the day we meet she has just flown in on a private jet from New York with the artist photographer David LaChapelle, whose current ”American Jesus” exhibition in her brother Sebastian’s gallery in Burlington Road was something of a coup for Dublin. She is passionate about LaChapelle and his work, describing him as one of her oldest friends – in his company, she behaves almost like a starry-eyed teenager.
She had recently spent time with him in Hawaii, where he now lives. In Dublin, the two were inseparable for a week with a lot of time spent in the soon-to-be-reopened Wax Museum in the former armoury of the Bank of Ireland, where LaChapelle took pictures. (He couldn’t believe his luck when he discovered the heads of Margaret Thatcher and George Bush, minus his jaw, still in their packing cases waiting to be reassembled).
“I have relationships with various friends who are artists and designers and I am happiest in that milieu and just being in that process of creativity,” she says.
If Guinnesses are known for their low boredom threshold, iconoclasm and intolerance of pretension, then she’s unmistakably one of the clan. Her own ideas and style come, she says, from “reading, from being quite solitary as a child and having a huge imagination and playing and keeping that playfulness. My film is anti-commercial and it grew out of frustration of not being understood. I have no interest in selling something I don’t believe in. I wanted the fragrance bottle to feel good in the hand, to be in heavy glass, but what’s inside is what matters. I could do lots of different ones, but there’s no point in doing something that doesn’t come from your body and soul and that you don’t learn from. I don’t want to waste time.”
Does she want to make more movies? “Oh, wow, yes,” she responds with gusto. “I am a very visual person. You take your eye and just use it in a different way. I learned so much about special effects and producing images in an intelligent, organic way. I wanted it to have a proper narrative. You take that eye wherever you go, whether it’s watching the top seamstresses at Chanel or flea-market finds. It’s an instant thing.”
Ireland has a special meaning for her. “We used to come for holidays a month a year, staying with Desmond [Guinness, founder of the Irish Georgian Society] in Leixlip, and I remember Easter egg hunts at Luggala [the estate in Wicklow owned by Garech de Brún, a member of the family]. I have lived in so many places and as long as I am with people that I love, I am happy. I don’t feel comfortable in inauthentic surroundings and I think Ireland is a very authentic place. I love London, but it has changed with this worship of money and Thatcherism - though I know that coming from me, that could be taken out of context.”
Being the mother of three children has had its challenges, too. Her eldest son is majoring in English literature at Yale – she mentions casually that she read him War and Peace at the age of four – while her second son is still a student, as is her teenage daughter, whom she describes as “clever, intelligent, very beautiful and very kind”. When not with her, the children stay with their father in New York.
We discuss her extraordinary heelless black skyscraper shoes which, with a brief flick of the foot, convert into flats. It’s another idea of hers, realised in collaboration with a young shoe designer in London. Does she always wear such high shoes?
“I feel depressed in flats – I only wear them in the gym and I haven’t been to the gym in ages. I hate being small,” she adds. But ideas fire her and being able, as she put it once, to be a midwife to genius. “Give me a visual or a literary problem to work on and that is where I am happy. It is about being authentic. Now is the time for artists and I feel very optimistic that there will be a flowering. You want to have a great idea and take it forward. I am only as great as the people with whom I collaborate.”
Daphne, limited to 3,000 bottles, is available from Comme des Garcons in London’s Dover Street Market, Barneys in New York and other select emporia. One blog reported: “Subtle it is not. At the launch party the waves of incense, bitter orange and tuberose were almost visible in the air.”