To most, Daphne Guinness is perhaps little more than an extravagant heiress, the daughter of Jonathan Guinness and ex-wife of Greek shipping magnate, Spyros Niarchos. For fashion, however, she is long acknowledged as a patron of the arts, a collector of haute couture and an advocate of extremely impractical heels. Interestingly, Guinness has never tried to brand herself, likely because she never needed the income, nor is it easy to market a person whose something of a living art object herself.
So when Guinness revealed to New York that she's been making and "modifying" clothes for herself over the years, our ears perked up. Is fashion's most well-funded fan foraying into dressmaking? She tells the magazine "I am making costumes for a film I am in the middle of shooting and I like to wear them in so I am comfortable. Anyway, a long and boring story, but I have probably made about 100 pieces. I have no production and they are figments of my imagination made real."
Details of the film remain a mystery, but what's intriguing about Guinness realizing "figments of [her] imagination" for the project is that, for we non-billionaire fashionistas, Daphne represents our ultimate fashion fantasy, her wardrobe assembled with limitless budget and tremendous resources. In some ways, she is a figment of our own fashion imagination, a clotheshorse for seemingly impossible apparel. So the prospect of seeing what's born out of the muse's own creative impulses, and how it differs from the designers she favors, is especialy exciting. Of course, we can only hope that Guinness actually reveals what film she's in and where we can see it.
