June 17, 2024

Style, Stoicism, Optimism: Daphne Guinness's Perspective

25 minutes

Daphne Guinness is a style icon and creative force. Heiress to the Guinness brewing dynasty, she transcends her lineage as a fashion muse, designer, and philanthropist. Renowned for her avant-garde fashion sense—and her extraordinary couture collection—Guinness seamlessly blends artistry and eccentricity, distinctly weaving past sartorial narratives into the contemporary. Her collaborations with designers like Alexander McQueen and Gareth Pugh have left an indelible mark on the fashion world. But beyond fashion, she is a musician, and writer with a flair for the dramatic and the unexpected. A self-described pessimistic optimist, Guinness is an enigmatic persona and a captivating perennial figure in both high society and artistic circles worldwide.

Episode Highlights:

Guinness says her formative years were a mixture of “art, stoicism, military thought, and surrealism.”

She’s interested in philosophy and the Stoics and calls herself happy to be an outcast.

As a child, she lived in a monastery in Spain with no other than Salvador Dali as a neighbor— “he put me up to make some of my best pranks as a child.”

On the pre-1999 era of Daphne Guinness, she says she was never a society wife, only a mother, hermetic.

Her friendship with magazine editor Isabella Blow, her relative “in spirit,” exposed her to things and people most people would only ever dream of or see in a film.

Guinness’s otherworldly aura and fantastical upbringing seems perfectly normal from her perspective.

She was mentored by David Bowie, who spotted her as a singer. She recently released “Hip Neck Spine,” which has a music video directed by the legendary Nick Knight.

Philanthropic efforts are crucial to her; Guinness sponsors a CSM scholarship every year.

She considers herself a pessimistic optimist, exhausted by putting her heart and soul into her art and music—she sees what’s contemporary as pessimism, but she’s “Team optimism.”

She sees the beauty in human error and process, saying, “I like to do things the old-fashioned way.”

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By What's Contemporary

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