Think Design Magazine Fashion Feature February 2012 - Daphne Guinness

Imagine you go to a party and come upon a fashion trendsetter lying in a coffin with a diamond encrusted golden glove she has designed propped up on her hand for all to see while she plays dead. You might wonder how someone who is a beer heiress can hate parties or you might be impressed with the interesting way that Daphne Guinness found to show off her glove design without having to engage in small talk. The glove is currently being sold for $1.76 million dollars so she must be doing something right. To top it off, while she lay in the coffin, she wore an Alexander McQueen cat-suit and meditated for 3 hours. This is just a small part of the life of the fashion influencer of the moment. She has reached that consciousness point, that celebrity situation where we begin to hear a name, quietly and scarcely at first and ignore it, like we did with Lady Gaga in the beginning, then the voices get louder until they are shouting in your ears and you have to listen. Once you do, you find a complex and interesting person behind all the celebrity ruckus. Then we begin to realize she has something to say about fashion.

Guinness is the daughter of Jonathan Guinness and his second wife, Suzanne Lisney, and part heir to the Guinness Beer fortune. During the 80s, she lived in New York City with her sister Catherine Guinness, who was then a friend and companion of Andy Warhol, which surely had a strong influence in both of them. She married Spyros Niarchos, the son of a Greek shipping billionaire at the age of 19, but divorced in 1999 with a reported settlement of about $40 million dollars. She splits her time between London and Manhattan. Her relationship with married French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévi has been acknowledged by most American society writers and confirmed by Guinness herself.

How has Guinness come to be such an influencer? She has designed for Dover Street Market and released a fragrance with Comme Des Garçons. She has collected fashion, specifically haute couture, for a number of years, and in 2010 bought the entire wardrobe of the late Isabella Blow. Guinness is also prominent in the fashion world as a journalist and in September 2010, NARS Cosmetics launched a new collection dedicated to her. Valentino and Tom Ford clamor to have her wearing their clothes. Steven Klein shot her in couture for a spread in Italian Vogue that is among the magazine’s most buzzed-about photo shoots in recent years. The pop star Lady Gaga, with her sky-high platform shoes and mop of blond hair with a thick streak of black running through it, seems to be virtually pillaging Guinness’s closet for ideas. According to the Times of London Newspaper the aforementioned Bernard-Henri Lévi once told her, “You are no longer a person; you are a concept!”

Fantastic stuff! Continue reading article at:  http://www.thinkdesignmagazine.com/Fashion/daphneguinness