Daphne Guinness, 57, is one of fashion's most electric muses. Her creative provenance was nurtured by her close relationships with Alexandra McQueen, Isabella Blow, Karl Lagerfeld and David Bowie. But in a more conventional sense, her provenance stretches back through two infamous dynasties.
'My true family is my family of artists, Alexander, Issie and Bowie,' she says from LA, where she is working on her new album. '[But] my family of origin is obviously the Guinness family.'
Neatly, both elements of her life are being brought to the screen. First comes Netflix's House of Guinness, set in 1860s Dublin, it documents the Succession-style origin story and the family's falling out after the death of the brewery patriarch Benjamin Guinness.
The show, from Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight, stars James Norton and Dervla Kirwan and was conceived by Ivana Lowell, whose grandmother, Maureen Guinness, was a society fixture of the 1920s. ‘It’s fairly surreal to see my family being turned into a show,’ says Daphne, adding that there are plans for a family watch party. ‘We’re longing to find out if there are any mysteries to be solved.’
The modern Guinnesses are a sprawling mass. ‘One’s always discovering new cousins,’ quips Daphne. ‘There are thousands of Guinnesses. It’s like being part of a rather wonderful eccentric tribe.’
Daphne’s father is Jonathan Guinness, son of Bryan Guinness and Diana Mitford – to add another historic dynasty of the 20th century. ‘I feel like I’m in a Venn diagram of stories, because between my artistic stories and the Mitford stories and the Guinness stories [it’s like being in] the eye of the storm, which can be a blessing and a curse. It’s interesting to a point, but you try not to get sucked too much into any direction,’ she reflects.
Her father, who has eight children with two wives and one mistress, was a non-executive director of the brewery for 27 years. ‘I knew a lot about brewing as a young nipper,’ she laughs. ‘The chemistry of what went into beer, the advertisements and the world records. That was always fascinating. There’s nothing like an actual Irish Guinness out of a barrel in Dublin.’
We all, of course, take the families we are born into at face value. ‘One doesn’t realise that anything’s out of the ordinary,’ she says. Although by any measure her childhood was extraordinary. Raised between Ireland, France, Spain and England, long summers in Cadaqués split up her time at boarding school in Oxfordshire; her French mother, Suzanne Lisney, was best friends with artist Salvador Dalí, who lived next door to their converted Spanish church.
‘He used to give me lots of tips on how to play tricks on my parents, which was useful,’ she recalls. ‘He had a wonderful way of speaking English, very elaborate with lots of unusual adjectives, which was very funny.’ She describes having to fend for herself with a huge amount of freedom to ‘paint and walk and climb trees and fall out of them. I liked being solitary, I was a bit of a tomboy.’ At school she was accused of tall tales when she shared anything of her eccentric family life. ‘If you tried to compare notes they just thought you were making it up.’ She was musical at school and had ambitions to become an opera singer, but a more conventional path called; she married at 18 and had her first of three children at 20.
It was in her thirties, post-divorce, that she emerged on to the fashion and social scene, finding success as a creative force in modelling, acting and music when David Bowie insisted she become a recording artist. ‘Having had a bohemian childhood, I reverted to type,’ she says. She is now indistinguishable from her signature look, an authentic voice of the avant garde with that sweep of platinum and grey-streaked hair, in her uniform of fitted jackets, tiny shorts and heel-less Noritaka Tatehana platform shoes.
While plotting her creative passions – she runs her own fledgling record label, Agent Anonyme Recordings (‘going to the pub, finding acts; it’s brilliant’) as well as producing her own music – she describes the Guinness name as a ‘paradox. It’s both a key and a barrier.’
She points out the hyperbole that comes with dynastic succession can drown out the reality of who you are. ‘It made people assume things that weren’t necessarily true. It was rather annoying to have to break away from that name and to become someone in your own right. I’m not complaining, because everyone has to come from somewhere. People like Bowie or McQueen, they wouldn’t have worked with me if I wasn’t good at what I did. It can open a door, but then it’s what you do after you open that door.’
Arguably her creative prowess has eclipsed her name and it is in that capacity that her second family will grace the screen. In The Queen Of Fashion, Andrea Riseborough will star as Isabella Blow, with Stacy Martin playing Daphne. A release date is yet to be announced, but filming is complete.
Daphne, who purchased Blow’s entire fashion archive after her death in 2007, loaned the clothes to the production. ‘I absolutely had to. Issie, wherever she is, would hit me with a lightning bolt if it didn’t look right.’ Manolo Blahnik and Philip Treacy contributed shoes and hats respectively. ‘It’s going to be an out of body experience,’ says Daphne, describing the production as ‘the last piece of the karmic jigsaw puzzle. Those deaths really marked me, you’re never going to bring anybody back, but you can try to reverse some of the pain somehow. It’s not for myself, but it’s for their legacy.’