New York Times Article: Daphne Guinness, Fashion’s Wild Child, by Guy Trebay

Article can be read at The New York Times

Daphne Guinness, Fashion’s Wild Child

By GUY TREBAY

NO organ is more promiscuous than the eye, and no appetite more insatiable than the hunger to look. These truths go a long way toward explaining the preoccupations of a culture whose interest in imagery is defining. They also help one understand the ever-creeping appeal of fashion, a sphere that, like sport, is largely populated by arresting-looking people doing stuff that is legible without the help of words.

It is not that fashion never requires translation; a lot of it is arcane even to adepts. Certain people, too, contradictorily are both creations of the fashion world and yet somehow seem to exist outside it. Actors in a social theater, as we all are, they rise above the ordinary by giving sartorial performances unfettered by the bonds of convention or propriety or practicality or, often enough, common sense.

Daphne Guinness is one such wonderful oddity. Over the last year, hers has been among the most startling, engaging and snake-fascinating presences on the scene. Whether darting across the Place Vendôme in Paris or chatting with Alex Rodriguez at a mosh-pit art-world dinner during Art Basel Miami Beach or seated demurely at a staid dinner benefiting the American Academy in Rome, Ms. Guinness is a reliably otherworldly apparition.

Her mounds of skunk-dyed hair may be piled to “Bride of Frankenstein” heights or cantilevered in a lace kerchief that lends her a resemblance to a Rastafarian with an opulent mane of dreadlocks. Her lithe sparrow’s frame may be cinched into a sequined dress from the latest Chanel couture collection or swathed in majestic Grecian draperies or stiff garments that resemble something out of the wardrobe closet for “Spartacus” or gold lamé leggings that look as if they’d been applied with an airbrush.

Whatever else she has on, Ms. Guinness invariably wears the real jewels, her own, that distinguish her from the numerous society sandwich-boards seen strutting around, camera ready, in borrowed finery and gems. And she is typically shod in footgear whose platform soles are so high that they defy both the precepts of feminism and the laws of gravity (and the latter not always successfully; she has been known to tumble from the heights of her specially made Christian Louboutins). Venetian courtesans teetering on 17th-century wooden chopines had nothing on Ms. Guinness, whose progress to the women’s room from the dinner table at one charity dinner last fall kept a room full of guests in bated-breath suspense.

Who is this woman, what form of rara avis bedecked in diamonds and plumes?

You won’t have any trouble finding out if you ask a person with the least interest in style. Ms. Guinness — as Lady Gaga, an avowed fan, could tell you — is a titled brewery heiress; a granddaughter of Diana Mitford, the wife of the British nobleman and fascist Oswald Mosley; the ex-wife of Spyros Niarchos, scion of a fabulously wealthy Greek shipping dynasty; the 43-year-old mother of three children; the consort of Bernard-Henri Lévy, a wealthy French intellectual almost as renowned for his mind as for his luxuriant mane; and a muse to photographers as unalike as David LaChapelle and Steven Klein and to designers like the English tyro Gareth Pugh.

That she has always been defined in terms of the men in her life goes a long way toward explaining Ms. Guinness’s reinvention of herself roughly a decade ago as a kind of performance artist whose tool kit is her wardrobe. The febrile-looking, almost lunar creature that emerged from a wifely chrysalis can sometimes appear as a techno/aesthetic movement mash-up: part Huysmans and part Jules Verne. That she is handsome and even-featured only partly explains the way she captivates viewers and the lens of a camera. Plenty of good-looking women of fashion get themselves up in outlandish outfits; relatively few retain interest after the initial jolt of surprise has faded away.

Because she is rich and socially secure and also blessed with theatrical gifts hard to categorize, Ms. Guinness tends to fall outside the understanding of many observers, who look at her wearing shoes with no heels or face-obscuring veils or headpieces reminiscent of carnival ponies and brand her a freak.

What Daphne Guinness is not, she insists, is eccentric. “I truly hate the word,” she said recently, a complaint uttered first in a telephone call from London and repeated from 35,000 feet above the Atlantic as she flew to the South of France for Christmas (as a stipulation of the Guinness-Niarchos divorce settlement, her children spend the holidays with their father’s family). “I’m actually very grounded,” she added. “Also, eccentrics are almost asexual, and that is not something you can say of me, by any means.”

For Ms. Guinness, her wardrobe antics and often outlandish appearances in public “are kind of an ever-evolving art project,” she explained. “When I was a child,” being raised largely among the haute bohemians of the wealthy expatriate colony of Cadaqués, Spain, Ms. Guinness said: “I was overly serious and thoughtful, a real tomboy, always dressing up as a knight or a pirate or a red Indian. If there is anything you can say about me, it’s that I have not lost the imagination I had when I was 5 years old.”

Neither has she lost the tendency to dress in a way that makes it sometimes seem as if she is pushing impatiently outward at the boundaries of gender. Yet critics who see in Ms. Guinness's tough technological style — in her slightly barbarous emphasis on wearing feathers and pelts, in her taste for hardware — a rebuke to traditional femininity might be surprised to learn that she is, in person, a surprisingly girly girl. “For so much of my life, it was about being as small as possible or even invisible,” she said. “As a Niarchos, I was told constantly that you must and mustn’t be this or that. After I left my marriage, I found I was able to flex my muscles, to play with the way I looked again.”

Fashion, noted Ms. Guinness, who said she never reads the fashion magazines that make a fetish of her (“Scientific American is my heaven,” she said), is not meant to be taken seriously. Rule-bound by definition, fashion nonetheless holds out the possibility for self-transformation, masquerade, serious flights of fancy and even occasionally cultural critique. In Ms. Guinness’s case, it also provides a pretext for the enactment of a continuing commentary on what it means to perform the public role of a woman; as a kind of 21st-century geisha, she finds herself with the means to bypass traditional systems of patronage and the wit to mount a lively, unorthodox theater of womanliness solely to amuse herself.

“Of course, I get it wrong 60 percent of the time, but it’s about the experimentation,” Ms. Guinness said. “So much spirit and freedom of experimentation died in the ’80s,” she added. “It started with AIDS; AIDS wiped all that out. And so many of the people who would understand what I’m doing are dead now. Still, even though I am not trained at this, I try to find new ways of expressing myself and to use whatever it is I have creatively. I am not an eccentric, and I am not some sort of multitrillionaire just interested in buying clothes.”

Clothes are far from a driving force, Ms. Guinness said. What inspires her experimental flights is something more hard-headed and ordinary — a bristling refusal to conform.

“What drives me now is the idea of something being against the world,” she said. “I’m an artist, I suppose.”

New York Times Article: Daphne Guinness, Fashion’s Wild Child, by Guy Trebay

Article can be read at The New York Times

Daphne Guinness, Fashion’s Wild Child

By GUY TREBAY

NO organ is more promiscuous than the eye, and no appetite more insatiable than the hunger to look. These truths go a long way toward explaining the preoccupations of a culture whose interest in imagery is defining. They also help one understand the ever-creeping appeal of fashion, a sphere that, like sport, is largely populated by arresting-looking people doing stuff that is legible without the help of words.

It is not that fashion never requires translation; a lot of it is arcane even to adepts. Certain people, too, contradictorily are both creations of the fashion world and yet somehow seem to exist outside it. Actors in a social theater, as we all are, they rise above the ordinary by giving sartorial performances unfettered by the bonds of convention or propriety or practicality or, often enough, common sense.

Daphne Guinness is one such wonderful oddity. Over the last year, hers has been among the most startling, engaging and snake-fascinating presences on the scene. Whether darting across the Place Vendôme in Paris or chatting with Alex Rodriguez at a mosh-pit art-world dinner during Art Basel Miami Beach or seated demurely at a staid dinner benefiting the American Academy in Rome, Ms. Guinness is a reliably otherworldly apparition.

Her mounds of skunk-dyed hair may be piled to “Bride of Frankenstein” heights or cantilevered in a lace kerchief that lends her a resemblance to a Rastafarian with an opulent mane of dreadlocks. Her lithe sparrow’s frame may be cinched into a sequined dress from the latest Chanel couture collection or swathed in majestic Grecian draperies or stiff garments that resemble something out of the wardrobe closet for “Spartacus” or gold lamé leggings that look as if they’d been applied with an airbrush.

Whatever else she has on, Ms. Guinness invariably wears the real jewels, her own, that distinguish her from the numerous society sandwich-boards seen strutting around, camera ready, in borrowed finery and gems. And she is typically shod in footgear whose platform soles are so high that they defy both the precepts of feminism and the laws of gravity (and the latter not always successfully; she has been known to tumble from the heights of her specially made Christian Louboutins). Venetian courtesans teetering on 17th-century wooden chopines had nothing on Ms. Guinness, whose progress to the women’s room from the dinner table at one charity dinner last fall kept a room full of guests in bated-breath suspense.

Who is this woman, what form of rara avis bedecked in diamonds and plumes?

You won’t have any trouble finding out if you ask a person with the least interest in style. Ms. Guinness — as Lady Gaga, an avowed fan, could tell you — is a titled brewery heiress; a granddaughter of Diana Mitford, the wife of the British nobleman and fascist Oswald Mosley; the ex-wife of Spyros Niarchos, scion of a fabulously wealthy Greek shipping dynasty; the 43-year-old mother of three children; the consort of Bernard-Henri Lévy, a wealthy French intellectual almost as renowned for his mind as for his luxuriant mane; and a muse to photographers as unalike as David LaChapelle and Steven Klein and to designers like the English tyro Gareth Pugh.

That she has always been defined in terms of the men in her life goes a long way toward explaining Ms. Guinness’s reinvention of herself roughly a decade ago as a kind of performance artist whose tool kit is her wardrobe. The febrile-looking, almost lunar creature that emerged from a wifely chrysalis can sometimes appear as a techno/aesthetic movement mash-up: part Huysmans and part Jules Verne. That she is handsome and even-featured only partly explains the way she captivates viewers and the lens of a camera. Plenty of good-looking women of fashion get themselves up in outlandish outfits; relatively few retain interest after the initial jolt of surprise has faded away.

Because she is rich and socially secure and also blessed with theatrical gifts hard to categorize, Ms. Guinness tends to fall outside the understanding of many observers, who look at her wearing shoes with no heels or face-obscuring veils or headpieces reminiscent of carnival ponies and brand her a freak.

What Daphne Guinness is not, she insists, is eccentric. “I truly hate the word,” she said recently, a complaint uttered first in a telephone call from London and repeated from 35,000 feet above the Atlantic as she flew to the South of France for Christmas (as a stipulation of the Guinness-Niarchos divorce settlement, her children spend the holidays with their father’s family). “I’m actually very grounded,” she added. “Also, eccentrics are almost asexual, and that is not something you can say of me, by any means.”

For Ms. Guinness, her wardrobe antics and often outlandish appearances in public “are kind of an ever-evolving art project,” she explained. “When I was a child,” being raised largely among the haute bohemians of the wealthy expatriate colony of Cadaqués, Spain, Ms. Guinness said: “I was overly serious and thoughtful, a real tomboy, always dressing up as a knight or a pirate or a red Indian. If there is anything you can say about me, it’s that I have not lost the imagination I had when I was 5 years old.”

Neither has she lost the tendency to dress in a way that makes it sometimes seem as if she is pushing impatiently outward at the boundaries of gender. Yet critics who see in Ms. Guinness's tough technological style — in her slightly barbarous emphasis on wearing feathers and pelts, in her taste for hardware — a rebuke to traditional femininity might be surprised to learn that she is, in person, a surprisingly girly girl. “For so much of my life, it was about being as small as possible or even invisible,” she said. “As a Niarchos, I was told constantly that you must and mustn’t be this or that. After I left my marriage, I found I was able to flex my muscles, to play with the way I looked again.”

Fashion, noted Ms. Guinness, who said she never reads the fashion magazines that make a fetish of her (“Scientific American is my heaven,” she said), is not meant to be taken seriously. Rule-bound by definition, fashion nonetheless holds out the possibility for self-transformation, masquerade, serious flights of fancy and even occasionally cultural critique. In Ms. Guinness’s case, it also provides a pretext for the enactment of a continuing commentary on what it means to perform the public role of a woman; as a kind of 21st-century geisha, she finds herself with the means to bypass traditional systems of patronage and the wit to mount a lively, unorthodox theater of womanliness solely to amuse herself.

“Of course, I get it wrong 60 percent of the time, but it’s about the experimentation,” Ms. Guinness said. “So much spirit and freedom of experimentation died in the ’80s,” she added. “It started with AIDS; AIDS wiped all that out. And so many of the people who would understand what I’m doing are dead now. Still, even though I am not trained at this, I try to find new ways of expressing myself and to use whatever it is I have creatively. I am not an eccentric, and I am not some sort of multitrillionaire just interested in buying clothes.”

Clothes are far from a driving force, Ms. Guinness said. What inspires her experimental flights is something more hard-headed and ordinary — a bristling refusal to conform.

“What drives me now is the idea of something being against the world,” she said. “I’m an artist, I suppose.”

Anna Sui Fall 2009 preview

Vika Kuropyatnikova/Supreme wearing Anna Sui Fall 2009:

Photo: Paul Park
Testing Her Strong Suit

By GUY TREBAY
Published: February 11, 2009

“IT’S survival of the fittest at this point,” the designer Anna Sui said cheerily last week, as she glided around her Garment Center workroom, a space crammed with vintage mannequin heads, clothes racks, books and trimmings. She was referring, of course, to the nine days of fall collections that begin on Friday in lofts around the city and at the Bryant Park tents.

It has been many seasons since Ms. Sui first showed clothes on a runway, starting in 1991 when she unveiled a feminine style that evokes an addled ingénue unafraid of a drink or of letting her knickers show: Lily Allen almost before the British singer and It Girl was born.

The clothes in Ms. Sui’s first show were modeled by pals, among them Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell. That those professional beauties were then at the height of their fame helped stoke the reception the designer got from buyers and the news media, and it also insured industry embrace of a talented designer who had, until then, been working quietly and anonymously on other people’s lines.

Encouraged by other friends who included the makeup artist Pat McGrath and the photographer Steven Meisel, Ms. Sui hacked out a niche, to which two decades later, she is holding tight.

Unlike Marc Jacobs, Ms. Sui is not the designer the press looks to for cues to the immediate future of style. Compared to the $13 billion juggernaut Ralph Lauren forged, her business is relatively mom-and-pop. Critics have carped about the sameness of Ms. Sui’s designs, calling them overly thematic, too whimsical and — design death — cute. Yet her fan base remains loyal, and that is partly why Sui’s career seems to represent the kind ardently sought by design school students and “Project Runway” aspirants.

It is a career that, it almost goes without saying, is now buffeted by the deepest consumer retrenchment in a generation, the kind of economic wind shear that has already driven some designers into involuntary retirement and caused others to abandon the idea of earning any profits at all this year. Ms. Sui — neither household name nor dewy upstart — is part of the broad middle of the 200-designer Fashion Week spectrum, an emblem of the many creative talents facing a new runway season with a mixture of cautious optimism and outright dread.

Born in Detroit and educated at Parsons School of Design, Ms. Sui made all the journeyman stations of the cross before achieving overnight success when she was close to 40. Her company is privately held and remains profitable, she says. (Dun & Bradstreet estimates annual sales of $20 million.) Her clothing label is substantially underwritten by earnings from the 14 global fragrance and cosmetics licenses she operates in partnership with Procter & Gamble and her 42 store franchises in China, Japan, Taiwan and Kuwait.

Unlike many designers faced with imminent catastrophe, Ms. Sui is able to ride out a bad season and perhaps a bad year. Yet, like everyone in the trade, she feels the Darwinian chill that recession has cast on businesses of all kinds. “It’s never a sure thing,” she said. “I have a big responsibility to my licenses. All my licenses draw from and take ideas from the runway.” Thus, a show that will spotlight cardigans and dresses will also provide the pattern for a handkerchief sold in Tokyo.

“It’s not just designers who are affected,” by the impact of the economy on fashion, she said. As a longtime advocate for preserving the Garment Center, Ms. Sui is attuned to the perils to the industry over all when any designer or collection fails. Long before the recession hit, high rents had driven businesses out of the area. Employment in the apparel trade has shrunk drastically from its 1950s peak of 250,000 jobs to fewer than 20,000 today.

Without a production core, it becomes increasingly difficult for young designers to set up shop in the city, Ms. Sui said. “When I was starting, there were wool mills in the U.S. that could make you anything,” Ms. Sui said. “The U.S. used to produce the most beautiful cotton denim in the world. Now all that is gone.”

A person walking down Seventh Avenue runs little risk anymore of being mowed down by a pushcart. Just a handful of workrooms remain that can whip up custom trimmings, and there are few skilled workers capable of operating the bulky machinery required to make gossamer fripperies like Schiffli lace. Come 2010, when the runway shows move from Bryant Park to Lincoln Center, the last symbolic link between Seventh Avenue and Fashion Week will also be lost.

Fashion was a radically different business when she was starting out in the 1980s, Ms. Sui said — less corporate, more subject to the whims and intuitions of gifted merchants and also influenced by the fact that department stores could still afford to showcase unknowns thanks to open-to-buy budgets.

“Every decision is harder for everyone to make now because things are so expensive,” Ms. Sui said, referring both to the steep cost of retail goods and the expenses designers incur to produce and mount collections two times a year.

“You have to ask yourself, ‘Is it worth the investment’ ” of paying $50,000 to rent space in the tents at Bryant Park, an additional $100,000 on production elements that include hair and makeup and dressers and sets and lighting and music, and even the food backstage.

A budget for models can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars per show, although it is an open secret in the business that there is no such thing as a fixed rate for a model’s services. These line items are all separate, of course, from the outlay required to create and produce the elements of a collection — the trims, shoes, boots, bags, accessories and hosiery.

“It’s all scary when all you hear is that nothing is selling,” Ms. Sui said. Yet, “no on has ever found a solution for not doing a fashion show,” she added.

And so late in 2008, she began building up mood boards, the inspiration flashcards created from tear sheets, postcards and scraps of cloth, and abstracting from a visit to the Fortuny Museum in Venice the germ of a collection based on beauties of the Belle Epoque.

She devised a striped floral jacquard print reminiscent of a Vuillard interior. She began conjuring “a Proustian feeling, although I knew nothing about Proust,” she said, by reading “Swann’s Way” and scouring Netflix for Max Ophüls films.

At the Linea Pelle leather fair in Bologna last October, Ms. Sui began making the first of countless small decisions that go into each designer collection, shoes always preceding clothes because they require a long lead time to produce.

“You have to try to predict where things might go,” Ms. Sui said. Because designers have to calculate for shifts of taste within a season, she has also staggered the colors of her new collection to jibe with a shipping cycle that alters every six weeks, the hues becoming brighter as winter turns into spring. “I don’t have the luxury of making clothes just to make an effect,” Ms. Sui said. “It can’t be something totally frivolous, because my distributors have to have a successful season, too.”

THE task facing Ms. Sui, and all designers, in the current climate is “how to shake it up and make it different” without going too far, she said. “More than ever, you’re mindful of things that didn’t work in the past. You’re mindful of fabrics costing $5 more a yard. Once you start putting in markups on things like that, it turns into two or three times that at retail. And you are not going to sell something that is out of a reachable range.”

It is safe to say that what captures the attention of the 1,200 or so people who will pack the space known as the Tent — one of two runway spaces under the big top in Bryant Park — for Ms. Sui’s show next Wednesday, will be the lace-trimmed frocks, the piled on leggings, the sexy girls loping down the runway to the quirky rock soundtrack that is a Sui signature.

Backstage, waiting to take her usual modest bow, the designer will be focused on the question of whether this show will find a sweet spot and if it can stimulate enough interest to generate the $6 million in wholesale orders called for in her business plan.

“All you can really do at this point,” she said, “is hope for a collection that will send you to the moon.”