Of the more than half million visitors who attended “Savage Beauty,” the Metropolitan Museum’s blockbuster show dedicated to the work of the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen, few felt more intimately acquainted with the works on display than Daphne Guinness. Guinness was a friend of McQueen, as well as an aficionado of his designs, and her perspective on his darkly theatrical clothes has an unusual element of practicality. “Those dresses are quite difficult to take care of,” she said on a visit to the museum one morning in July, pausing in front of a floor-length long-sleeved gown with a ruffled skirt covered entirely with pheasant feathers—thousands of them, overlapping one another like fluffy, russet-colored chain mail. “You have to steam them down.”
Guinness, a forty-three-year-old with an elfin build, was wearing McQueen: a very short black wool pinafore over a very fitted, very starched white cotton shirt. The shirt had exorbitantly long sleeves that were pushed up to the elbow, and a high collar, around which Guinness had tied a periwinkle velvet ribbon. A pavé diamond brooch was pinned to the ribbon, and a silvery-gray scarf was swathed around her head and neck, concealing her hair, which is colored pale blond in the front and brunet in the back. Two of the fingers on her left hand were encased in articulated silver sheaths that looked as if they’d been purloined from a gauntlet in the Met’s Arms and Armor Court. She wore white fish-net stockings and a pair of custom-made sparkly silver Mary Janes, with a three-inch platform under the toe and a gaping space where a perilously high heel should have been, so that she stalked the galleries on demi-pointe. She looked as much of an art work as the items on display.
Guinness owned close duplicates of many of the clothes in the exhibition. She had a version of a billowing black piratical silk cape—“in a jellyfish material,” she noted, as if the term were self-explanatory. She had at least six McQueen bodysuits, made from skin-tight beige silk net embroidered with glass beads in patterns that evoked both corsetry and herpetology. “He said to me, ‘How many catsuits am I going to have to make for you?’ ” she recalled. “I know it’s a mad thing to like, but I love them.” She admired a long gown made from layers of sheer silk, which was from McQueen’s 2006 “Widows of Culloden” collection. In McQueen’s runway show that year, the gown had been presented not on a model but on a holographic projection of Kate Moss. The trick was reproduced at the Met, and Guinness, looking at the ghostly images of Moss, noted, “I was just at her wedding. I didn’t stay long. Just when everyone was looking so happy—that’s when I wanted to leave.”
After leaving the Met and stepping onto Fifth Avenue, Guinness was approached by a young man, who requested that she pose for a photograph with him. Guinness submitted, looking mildly beleaguered at having been recognized. “I thought the scarf would help,” she said, with a sigh, after the young man had left. She often wears a veil: “What’s great is tying a bit of net around your face, and everything looks like it’s in Super 8. It gives a bit of grain to the world.” Even before J. K. Rowling came up with the idea, Guinness dreamed of wearing a cloak that would render her invisible. For years, she has been on the lookout for a fabric, of which she has heard rumor, that is made from L.E.D.s. She imagines making a coat from the fabric with a tiny camera attached; the L.E.D.s would display images of the space around her, effecting a kind of social camouflage. When it is suggested to her that all a woman of forty-three need do to become invisible is to go without makeup, leave her hair uncolored, and wear ordinary clothes, she grows wide-eyed, as if the idea of doing any such thing were inconceivable.
Guinness has been variously described in the press as an heiress, a muse, a socialite, a designer, and an artist, and though all these characterizations are partly accurate, none quite conveys her affect, which is that of a slightly deranged fairy invented by C. S. Lewis. Her aesthetic is often futuristic, but she also appears to have come from a bygone age when getting dressed was considered a demanding form of self-expression, rather than an opportunity to wallow in spandex-enabled comfort. Even at the gym she does not submit to the conventions of the masses: she wears pristine white ballet slippers on the StairMaster. She wears diamonds all the time, even to the beach. Once, in Malibu, she lost a nineteen-thirties Cartier bracelet in the sand; after searching for it in vain, she remarked to a friend, insouciantly, that someone with a metal detector would have the find of his life. Her clothes are often mannish, with severely tailored contours, but embellished with delicate collars and cuffs in exquisite fabrics. Her palette is mostly black-and-white, though on occasion she veers vividly into color. With her fondness for lace ruffles and velvet chokers and frock coats of the sort worn by Regency dandies, and the disciplined line of her silhouette, Guinness often resembles both a Gainsborough portrait of a lady and a Gainsborough portrait of the lady’s husband. Her appearance is so interesting it suggests that her appearance is the least interesting thing about her.
In our age, sartorial flamboyance is often coupled with a lust for attention: Lady Gaga’s outlandish footwear helps her stand out in the cluttered pages of celebrity magazines. Both Guinness and Gaga have worn McQueen’s Armadillo shoes—monstrous, clubbed constructions with seven-inch heels—as well as shoes made by Noritaka Tatehana, a designer known for super-tall footwear that lacks heels. Guinness was slightly injured not long ago when she fell off a new pair of Tatehana’s red sequinned boots at the airport in Hanover, Germany; she was delighted to see that her blood matched her shoes. But even though Guinness once undressed, behind a scrim, in a display window at Barneys, she is known among her intimates for being shy and inward. (The Barneys performance occurred earlier this year, before the Met’s annual Costume Institute ball; a crowd watched from the sidewalk as she disrobed, then donned a dove-gray, panier-hipped, feathered McQueen gown, which gave her the appearance of a swan maiden mid-transformation.) Guinness manages to seem demure and composed even while sliding into a restaurant booth in an abbreviated minidress that would spell paparazzi disaster for Lindsay Lohan. She has the restraint and the impeccable manners of someone who has been brought up to attend balls that aren’t charity fund-raisers, such as those hosted by her great-aunt Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire.
Guinness’s father is Jonathan Guinness, a baron and an heir to the Irish brewery fortune; her grandmother was Diana Mitford, whom she resembles in appearance. (Though Guinness can look much younger than her years, she sometimes calls to mind a distinguished, emaciated, white-haired beauty of sixty.) Guinness herself might have been a marchioness: in her teens, she was courted by David Cholmondeley, the handsome, rich Earl of Rocksavage, now the Marquess of Cholmondeley, whose family seat, Houghton Hall, is one of the finest Palladian houses in Britain. Instead, she married Spyros Niarchos, a son of Stavros Niarchos, the Greek shipping billionaire, in 1987, when she was nineteen. They had three children, and for many years Guinness lived an extremely private life, moving between New York, St. Moritz, and Spetsopoula, the Niarchos family’s private island. Guinness was divorced in 2000 and returned to London with her children; in recent years, however, they have lived primarily with their father. “I thought it was important for them to have a father—but I didn’t realize how lonely I would get,” she says.
For the past five years, Guinness has been involved with Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher and timber heir. Lévy is married to Arielle Dombasle, an actress and a chanteuse, and Guinness has often alluded on her Twitter account to the heartbreak of the situation. (“I am a hopeless romantic. I would not think twice to die for love.”) She has twenty-two thousand followers on Twitter, and often posts links with captions like “Another night in the world” or “Mercury in retrograde,” which lead to artfully lit shots of her looking melancholy.
While Guinness was married, she was a regular at the couture shows in Paris; Chanel and Valentino were among the houses she favored. Although her acquisitions were more conservative then, she showed baroque inclinations. “She always had odd colors in her hair,” Robin Hurlstone, an art dealer who is Guinness’s best friend, says. “She had a very small pink clump, and she would say, ‘It’s fun, isn’t it, darling? Don’t you love it?’ And the next time it was blue.” After Guinness’s divorce, a more pronounced fashion sensibility emerged. “There was sort of a sea change, a reinvention,” Hurlstone says. “She had been in this jewelled Fabergé cage, which turned into a pressure cooker, and then she came out of it like Venus on the half shell.” Amanda Harlech, who advises Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel and has known Guinness for many years, says, “The Daphne that emerged is exactly the same as the Daphne I knew before, but there is more of it.”
An important influence was Isabella Blow, the eccentric champion of designers such as McQueen and Philip Treacy, the avant-garde milliner known for his madcap fascinators. As young women, Guinness and Blow had moved in the same social circles. (Blow’s grandmother Lady Vera Delves Broughton was romantically entangled with Guinness’s great-grandfather Lord Moyne, a British Minister of State who was assassinated by Zionist activists in 1944.) Guinness and Blow reconnected in the late nineties at Claridge’s, the hotel in Mayfair, at the ninetieth-birthday party of Guinness’s cousin Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. “The Queen Mother was there, in her rubies, dancing for a long, long time,” Guinness says. “It was white tie and tiara, and of course I didn’t have a tiara, so I made one out of feathers and lots of black chiffon. Issie just thought it was absolutely fantastic.”
Blow urged Guinness to befriend McQueen, and she and the designer became close. “I took him to Malibu once, but he wasn’t very happy,” she says. “He always liked London light.” Guinness appreciated the ways in which McQueen’s often restrictive clothes served as a kind of sartorial armor, fending off the approach of others. “That’s how he chose his friends—he recognized a certain vulnerability,” she says. “People thought he was a horrible misogynist, but he was trying to protect you.”
Blow committed suicide in 2007, after a diagnosis of ovarian cancer and a struggle with depression. When her clothing collection was put up for auction, at Christie’s, Guinness preëmpted the sale by buying the whole lot. She does not intend to wear the clothes, and hasn’t even looked at all of them. “It makes me cry,” she says. “It smells of her smell.” The suicide of McQueen early last year was another loss: “He called himself ‘a romantic schizophrenic,’ and that romanticism was what we all had in common.”
Even if she hadn’t bought Blow’s mantle, Guinness would have inherited it metaphorically: she now inhabits for the fashion world the role, formerly occupied by Blow, of the slightly batty minor aristocrat. But Guinness’s aesthetic is quite different. Blow, who was buxom and toothy, with a black bob and bright-red lips, brought out the comedy in whatever she wore, even if it was a dominatrix-inspired black leather dress. Guinness’s mode is more tragic, and more suggestive of masochism. She costumes herself with the bodily rigor that is seen among ballet dancers, whose art depends upon the denial of pain and the mastery of appetite. Even if Guinness insists that her heel-less shoes are comfortable, they connote suffering, and render her literally unstable. Her appearance conveys a sense of immense discipline combined with boundless fragility. It is impossible to look at her and not wonder when, in some way or another, she will topple.
Guinness’s clothing collection, which she keeps in her homes in London and New York, includes twenty-five hundred garments, four hundred and fifty pairs of shoes, seventy hats, and two hundred handbags. This fall, the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology will devote one of its galleries to about a hundred of Guinness’s most important pieces. Valerie Steele, the director and chief curator of the F.I.T. museum, puts Guinness in the lineage of Grace Kelly, Tina Chow, and Nan Kempner—women whose wearing of clothes amounts to a form of creativity in itself. Most of what Guinness acquires she intends to wear, although she will occasionally buy an item purely for its aesthetic virtues, like the purple Dior coat that hangs in her closet, unworn, because purple isn’t her color. Guinness is unafraid to wear garments that may land her on the fashion-mistakes page of a tabloid, as a McQueen orange-and-violet silk kimono did the other month, and she’s also unafraid to wear things that others might regard as unwearable for different reasons. Steele says, “Daphne e-mailed me the other day to say, ‘Do you know where I can get some more Qing-dynasty robes? Mine are getting hammered.’ ”
In mid-July, Guinness was in New York to work with the team at F.I.T. to style the mannequins that would display her clothes. Racks of garments were arrayed in the conservation room at the museum, divided into themes: “Dandy,” “Armor,” “Sparkle.” Guinness arrived at F.I.T. midmorning in a limousine that had driven her from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where she had spent the weekend at the house of Walton Ford, the artist, who is a friend. She was wearing an oversized white dress shirt, buttoned over a pair of tights of her own design, which were opaque on the lower leg and sheer from the mid-thigh up, like support hose in reverse. She had a black ribbon around her throat and a diamond brooch pinned to her sleeve. She wore heel-less, hooflike black shoes, which, in combination with the tights, gave her the rangy look of a Thoroughbred in a chemise.
Steele and her team had set aside three days to style the show with Guinness, but she got through most of it in a matter of hours. “This is easy,” she said, briskly, pulling a Chanel frock coat from the racks. “It has a waistcoat with it,” she said, pronouncing the word “weskit,” as the Queen would. She demonstrated how she might accessorize a jacket with a diamond pin attached to the inside of the collar, so that it reflects a discreet, flattering light on her face. “No real diamonds in the show!” Steele said, with a note of nervousness.
Guinness wrapped ribbons around shirt collars—“The most useful things in the world,” she said—and tested out several pairs of pants to see which best complemented a cream-colored fur jacket by McQueen, finally settling on a pair of sequinned silver leggings. She indicated exactly where a black Balmain dress should be fastened with a brooch: “Otherwise, horrible skinny boobs,” she said. Her taste and touch were admirable. (It seems inevitable that many women, after visiting the show, will pin brooches inside their collars.) She plucked an oyster-colored sleeveless silk coat by Rick Owens from a rack, and distractedly draped it over her arm while she went to examine a Chanel gown on the other side of the room. As she dragged the coat on the floor behind her, Fred Dennis, the F.I.T. museum’s senior curator, wordlessly pointed and whimpered.
Guinness’s form of creative expression could be seen, of course, as merely a rarefied form of consumerism. One day after she had been preparing for the show at F.I.T., she went to B. & J. Fabrics, a store in the fashion district patronized by designers and fashion students, to pick up a few ribbons for the show and to look for other useful items. She examined some Chantilly lace—“Oh, my God, that’s great,” she said—and veered away from a section of rough, undyed linens. “We’re moving into shrouds here,” she said, darkly. “Better get away from the shrouds.”
Though Guinness has no fashion training, she has many garments made to her own specifications—and a few years ago Dover Street Market, a London emporium, collaborated with her on a line of shirts. She scours fabric stores the way a good cook does a butcher shop. She told a shop assistant, “I’m always on the lookout for voile,” and he brought out bolt after bolt of tulle and skeins of interlocking metallic hoops.
She waited by the cutting table in her heel-less shoes, varying her pose for comfort. Sometimes she stood on one leg and bent the other out behind her, like a stork; sometimes she flexed her ankles so that both heels dropped to the ground and her toes pointed upward. When she did this, she suddenly descended several inches, giving the disconcerting impression that she was shrinking, like Alice after consuming the bottle labelled “Drink me.” She explained that she hoped to get a sewing machine, which would allow her to make some of her more basic garments, like leggings, at home. “It’s probably better to be more connected to one’s leggings,” she said. When she’d finished making her fabric selections, she dug for her wallet in a green alligator Hermès bag, which also contained a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.” Upon finding the wallet, she handed it to her assistant, who paid the bill with a credit card. Guinness didn’t know how much she’d spent until she’d left the store: six thousand dollars.
Guinness has a rich person’s obliviousness about money. When asked if she has ever had no money, she said, emphatically, that she had. “Oh, God, yes,” she said. “You know, it happens often that you forget your wallet or something. But you just make your way back. You find some way to do it. You walk.” Her resources make her an important force in fashion, especially to young designers, whose expenditures at fabric stores tend to be more modest. Lately, she has been a proponent of Gareth Pugh, a young British designer. The F.I.T. show will include one of Pugh’s creations for Guinness: a lambskin pants suit embedded with thousands of tiny sharp nails pointing outward, like the metallic bristles on a dog-grooming brush. “We made it for my show, but we didn’t sell it—it is impossible to produce,” Pugh told me. “Daphne loved it and asked me to make her one. I said to her, ‘Are you sure you want the nails on the arse?,’ because I was thinking about her getting in and out of cars, and she said of course she did.” Pugh continued, “Maybe it was someone else’s car interior she was ruining.”
For the past few years, Guinness has owned an apartment on Fifth Avenue, in the former Stanhope Hotel. The apartment, which is more than four thousand square feet and was listed for fifteen and a half million dollars before she purchased it, is appointed with ebonized floors, red carpets that match Guinness’s customized nail-polish shade, and white walls that are hung with non-sartorial art. There are photographs by Araki, Gregory Crewdson, and her friend David LaChapelle; in the entrance hall hangs a large, beautiful collage, by Damien Hirst, made from butterfly wings. On side tables and window ledges delicate ceramic flowers have been placed under bell jars. A sixty-foot corridor that runs almost the length of the apartment is mirrored on walls and ceiling, so that walking along it is like entering a kaleidoscope. The master bathroom is similarly mirrored, so that one might lie in the bath and see oneself reflected above. Last year, however, Guinness stopped lying in her bath; she had repeatedly allowed her tub to run over, and the hedge-fund manager who lives downstairs sued her for a million dollars, citing damage and emotional distress. (The case is ongoing.)
Guinness’s living room, which overlooks the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park, has a pair of white chaises longues, a couch upholstered in red velvet, and a long table piled with books: Shakespeare, Proust, Herodotus, Churchill. In the library a whole shelf is devoted to P. G. Wodehouse. Guinness is an avid reader: she recently discovered the poetry of Hart Crane, on the recommendation of Harold Bloom, whose seminars she attended a few years ago, when her elder son, Nicolas, was a student at Yale. With Bloom she has struck up a correspondence, writing to him in elegant calligraphy on heavy paper. “She has got a kind of precarious beauty,” Bloom told me, fondly. “One wonderful day, there she was, looking very young and boyish in a black costume with a white ruff, and I said, ‘Daphne, dear, who are you?’ And she said, ‘Harold, I’m Hamlet.’ ”
Guinness has a complicated background, even by the standards of the British aristocracy. Her father, Jonathan Guinness—the third Baron Moyne—had three children with his first wife, Ingrid Wyndham, before she became involved with Paul Channon, Lord Kelvedon, who was a conservative Member of Parliament. In “Requiem for a Family Business,” a book that Guinness’s father published in 1997, he wrote, “The only satisfactory course was for her to divorce me and marry him. I was offended, I suppose, but not intolerably so.” He went on to marry Suzanne Lisney, who had grown up partly in France, and they had two children, Sebastian and Daphne. Daphne believed herself to be her father’s youngest child until the mid-eighties, when a British newspaper revealed that he had sired three more little Guinnesses with Susan (Shoe) Taylor, a hippie masseuse. “My mother was obviously not entirely happy with the situation,” Guinness said.
Guinness grew up in the family’s three homes, which included a house on Kensington Square, in London. (Guinness has been working on an autobiographical novel, in which she describes climbing out of a hatch in the attic and over the neighboring roofs: “There were spikes to prevent exactly this sort of thing, but I was small and nimble, and not much made me afraid. Not physical things anyway, only other people—and mainly those who drank.”) She spent a few months every year in Cadaqués, Spain, where her family owns a converted monastery, and where Salvador Dali was a neighbor. “It was like a Spanish Wuthering Heights,” Guinness recalled. “I would sort of wander around the hills, and I had all my little caves and things that I knew.”
She also spent time in the North of England, where, in the mid-seventies, her father—a member of the Conservative Party who belonged to a very right-wing faction called the Monday Club—ran unsuccessfully for Parliament. The young Daphne campaigned for him, a thankless task in a working-class district where the main industry was mining and, as Guinness recalled it, “everyone had an outside loo.” She said, “I would go around on my bike, and people would say, ‘No, I don’t want a Conservative sticker.’ ”
Guinness went to boarding school at St. Mary’s, Wantage, an institution favored by the British aristocracy. “When you’re English and you’ve been to a boarding school, there’s not much that can faze you,” she said. “There was the food: liver, with veins coming out—really horrible. And the sheer bloody-mindedness of the teachers.” School became even harder to tolerate after the death, in 1980, of her grandmother Diana’s second husband, Sir Oswald Mosley. Mosley was the founder of the British Union of Fascists, and Diana and Mosley were married, in 1936, at the house of Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler as a guest. Guinness knew little of her step-grandfather’s history, but had spent quite a lot of time in his company. “I used to go and stay in Paris with him, and I would sleep in his dressing room, and he would treat one like a complete adult—there would be these fascinating conversations around the dinner table about books, politics, art, whatever,” she said. “He was a very, very clever man.” Guinness saw the announcement of the death of Mosley, whom she called Kit, on the BBC evening news, at school. “I went, ‘That’s Cousin Kit!’ ” she said. “And that was it—I was persona non grata for the rest of my school days.”
Guinness was very close to her grandmother, although she was appalled by her politics, and was with her when she died, in Paris, in 2003. She remains dismayed that Diana never publicly recanted her admiration for Hitler, whom Diana had got to know in the thirties after travelling to Germany to visit her sister Unity, who had become part of der Führer’s inner circle. “My grandmother had grown up in the countryside, and she hadn’t been to school, and then she goes to Germany, and Unity is there, and then she becomes very, very friendly with him,” Guinness said. “I can’t imagine he was charming—he’s the most uncharming person I’ve ever seen, Hitler.” She recalled discussing the matter with Diana. “I said, ‘Granny, it just can’t be right,’ and she just said, ‘He didn’t photograph well.’ She said he was very, very funny.” When the war broke out, Diana spent three years in London’s Holloway prison. “She told me she read a lot of Racine,” Guinness said. Meanwhile, when Britain declared war on Germany, Unity Mitford shot herself in the head. “Why didn’t Unity shoot Hitler instead of herself?” Guinness said. “Then we’d be descended from heroes instead of villains.”
Guinness loves music, and when she was in her teens she had ambitions to become an operatic soprano. Robin Hurlstone, who is a few years her senior and had been a contemporary of a cousin of Guinness’s at Eton, took her to Vienna when she was seventeen. “We looked at a lot of Schieles and ate a lot of Wiener schnitzel and talked endlessly,” he says. “I remember her crying during the last twenty minutes of ‘Die Walküre.’ The sensitivity of this child was extraordinary.” Kenneth J. Lane, the jewelry designer and a Guinness family friend, remembers that Guinness sang arias to him at a costume ball in Regensburg, Germany, to celebrate the birthday of Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis. “She was in an eighteenth-century dress and wearing a powdered wig, and looking so beautiful you can’t imagine,” he told me. Guinness was planning to enroll at Guildhall, in London, to train as a singer, but abandoned serious pursuit of the art after she married. “Spyros didn’t like classical music, poor him; people either like it or they don’t, and you can’t criticize someone for that,” she told me. “I would go off and do it somewhere where he couldn’t hear me. And he used to think it depressed me, which it didn’t.” Guinness has occasionally taken singing lessons since, but does not sing in front of an audience larger than one or two friends. John Richardson, the biographer of Picasso, who has known Guinness since her teens, told me, “If you ask her to sing, she’ll do the ‘Queen of the Night.’ ” She sang it to Richardson on the beach at Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic, while staying at the home of Oscar and Annette de la Renta.
In recent years, Guinness has explored other arts. In 2004, she produced and fleetingly appeared in a movie, “Cashback”; as a customer in a supermarket, she was uncharacteristically costumed in sweatpants. Four years later, she directed a short film, “The Phenomenology of Body,” which focusses on costumes through the ages and the way that they have often constricted the female body; the movie will be part of the F.I.T. exhibit. In 2010, she played the title role in an experimental film, “The Murder of Jean Seberg,” which was directed by Joseph Lally, a photographer. Lally first encountered Guinness a few years ago, while working on a shoot with Steven Klein, the fashion photographer: “We were at Cyd Charisse’s house, in Hollywood, and she was sitting by the pool wearing a black dress with white diamonds. It was all kind of like Warhol, this woman in the back yard in a tiara.” Guinness barely speaks in Lally’s film, which was partly shot in her apartment, but she does pace her mirrored corridor moodily, and gives a convincing impersonation of a catatonic Seberg in bed. “In some ways, this film is also a record of the secret side of Daphne,” Lally has said.
Guinness would not call herself an artist. “I would feel like I was giving myself an accolade of some sort,” she says. “But I think I have an artistic temperament.” She recently completed a five-year “collaboration” with Shaune Leane, a fine-jewelry designer, who fashioned to her dimensions a white-gold chain-mail gauntlet studded with more than five thousand pavé diamonds. Reportedly, the piece is valued at $1.7 million, and Leane and Guinness own half shares. It was recently on display at a party at the London home of Jay Jopling, the art dealer; throughout the evening, Guinness lay, unmoving, on a Lucite bier, draped in veils and wearing the gauntlet, like an effigy on a medieval sarcophagus. She didn’t move even when Tom Ford, a guest, bent down to kiss her. “I stayed in character,” she said. “If you’re dead, you’re dead.”
She has also developed a belated career as a model. Not long ago, she did a shoot for German Vogue with Bryan Adams, the Canadian rock musician turned photographer. The shoot took place on a Wednesday in her apartment, which felt much smaller as it filled with fashion stylists, hairdressers, makeup artists, and photographer’s assistants, as well as Guinness’s two personal assistants and a maid, all of whom were bustling up and down the corridor.
The shoot had been inspired by Guinness’s admiration for David Bowie; the images would offer homage to him at different stages of his career. Wearing one blue contact lens, a red-and-blond wig, and a narrow black smoking jacket, Guinness uncannily evoked Bowie in his Thin White Duke guise, though she was, possibly, even thinner and whiter. To incarnate Ziggy Stardust, she let a stylist place an enormous metallic collar around her neck; the stylist apologized for any discomfort. “Are you kidding?” Guinness replied. “Uncomfortable is the name of the game.”
Teresa Alfonso, Guinness’s personal assistant, tried to get her to eat some of the pasta that had been prepared for the production team. “If I eat, I can’t work,” Guinness, who had been subsisting on Red Bull and Ensure, said. “I’ll eat when I’m dead.”
To convey Bowie’s Space Oddity period, Guinness dressed in a silver metallic minidress by Viktor and Rolf, and sat on her red velvet couch as two assistants smeared her bare legs with moisturizer. Adams, who had brought a guitar to the shoot, started strumming the Bowie song “Moonage Daydream,” and the room fell silent as Guinness sang along in a small, clear voice, gazing into the distance, as if she were alone. “Keep your electric eye on me, babe,” she sang. “Put your ray gun to my head.”
After the song was finished, Adams went back to his camera, and Guinness, with help, placed an enormous bell jar that had been on a side table over her head, like an astronaut’s helmet. The glass was thick and heavy, and it looked like it might crush her waifish shoulders, but the visual effect was impressive, and Adams’s camera snapped away. Then Guinness hunched her silvery shoulders, and slithered farther into the bell jar, so that it almost rested on the top of her head and extended down to her biceps. “How is this?” she asked from inside the bell jar, and her muffled voice was otherworldly, as if coming from far, far away. ♦
