Think you possibly shop too much?
Meet Daphne Guinness, 42-year-old brewery heiress, ex-wife of one of the world’s wealthiest men, mistress to one of the world’s most famous intellectuals, and clotheshorse nonpareil.
Guinness spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on haute couture and wears $300 Rick Owens T-shirts to the gym. She is a front-row fixture at fashion shows, a favorite of high-end designers, and was on the cover of Vogue Italia’s couture supplement in September 2008.
She has a fragrance, called Daphne, with Comme des Garcons and was a muse to the late designer Alexander McQueen. This fall, NARS cosmetics will introduce a line of makeup inspired by Guinness. In September 2011, her clothes will be on exhibit at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
With her skunk-striped hair, avant-garde wardrobe and love of theatricality, she’s like the couture version of Lady Gaga — she once met her married lover, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, for lunch at the Four Seasons, and both sat at the table, silently staring at each other behind sunglasses for minutes on end.
Last Monday, Christie’s announced it was calling off its auction of clothes, hats and art once owned by the late fashion muse Isabella Blow — because Guinness bought the entire collection.
“When I was working with her, she’d just commissioned a diamond-encrusted gauntlet,” said Kerry Taylor, owner of the house that handled Guinness’ 2008 auction in London.
“It’s a piece of jewelry that’s also a piece of armor. There are so few people around who’ve got taste and money and style — that’s why designers love her. Plus, she’s got a lovely figure and is soooo thin.”
By all accounts, Guinness is an extremely well-read woman, very bright, prone to self-deprecating humor, a bit fragile. And very, very existentially bored.
“Obviously, Daphne is style incarnate,” said Jim Reginato, who profiled Guinness for W magazine’s August 2009 issue. “But she is really intelligent. She does diamonds and particle physics.”
Guinness was raised in England and Ireland. On family vacations to Spain, her mother’s friends Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp would visit.
In the 1980s, Guinness moved to New York City and ran around with Warhol. At 19, she married shipping heir Spyros Niarchos, 13 years her senior; they had three children.
“I think she wanted out,” said one fashion-world acquaintance. “But it was a very difficult marriage to extricate herself from.”
She was reported to have walked away with $30 million — nowhere near the amount of money her own family has.
After the divorce, Guinness added black stripes to her platinum-blond hair and began wearing haute couture. She decided to auction off the bulk of the clothes she’d accumulated during her marriage, with the proceeds going to the advocacy group Womankind.
After that, Guinness flitted among London, Paris and New York City, where she lives on Fifth Avenue. She began to be seen often with the married Levy, who told her: “You are no longer a person; you have become a concept.”
She’s bemoaned her relationship in print, telling one British journalist in August 2009, “Love is agony, isn’t it? I’ve been involved with someone for quite some time now, but it’s all so complicated. . . . There is no hope.” Then she went looking for a Red Bull.
Though Levy’s wife, a famous French actress named Arielle, knew of the affair, it seemed that she was, in that very European way, content to ignore it — Paris was Arielle’s turf, and Guinness and Levy had New York City. That no longer seems the case.
“I heard this week that BHL and his wife are, in fact, breaking up,” said a Guinness acquaintance.
“She’s a very eccentric, independent woman,” he said. “She doesn’t play by the rules. That’s what’s so cool about her.”