The Incredible Evolution of the Great Daphne Guiness

This week The New Yorker ran a piece on Daphne Guinness, and much like everything the style icon does (or wears), the revelations from Rebecca Mead’s fantastic profile are surprising, over-the-top, and kind of absurd.

Guinness would probably be the first to admit that she’s not exactly your average human. After all it was her own boyfriend, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who said of her: “[she is] no longer a person, [she is] a concept.”

So what exactly is Daphne Guinness?

We have yet to fully figure it out but in light of the much-talked-about New Yorkerinterview, we explore the many facets of Daphne Guinness–from her style philosophy to her thoughts on Hitler–though we’re willing to bet the thing that will shock you most will be what the style icon looked like in the late ’80s. enjoy!

                                                      Vive Daphne!

                              

                                                       In 1986, Daphne had poufy 80s hair

According to her friend Robin Hurlstone, quoted inThe New Yorker, this fresh-faced beauty, pictured with then-husband Spyros Niarchos, was “in this jeweled Fabergé cage, which turned into a pressure cooker, and then she came out of it like Venus on the half shell.”

                                Daphne (here, in 2002) was, at one point, a pretty normal socialite.

Her family, however, never was. Her father, the heir to the Guinness brewery fortune, caused a scandal in the mid-eighties when it was revealed that he had sired three other children with a hippie masseuse Susan Taylor, better known simply as “Shoe” (no joke). Her grandmother Diana Mitford (of the infamous Mitford sisters), on the other hand, was married to a famous British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley and counted Hitler as one of her friends. Her great aunt was among Hitler’s inner circle, and committed suicide when Britain declared war. Daphne on der Führer, in the New Yorker: “I can’t imagine he was charming.”

                                                     

Daphne has struggled with financial issues, sort of. Asked if there was ever a period in her life where she didn’t have money, Daphne told The New Yorker: “Oh, God, yes. 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.”

                                 

              Daphne follows a strict diet. “I’ll eat when I’m dead.”–The New Yorkerå

                              

Daphne has the solution for the nation’s rampant unemployment: “I really don’t understand the idea of a celebrity stylist…Is it a real job? I know there’s unemployment, but frankly the railways need to be fixed too.”–In Harper’s Bazaar February 2011.


                                                  

                                  But that doesn’t mean she plans on getting a job anytime               soon. “I’m completely unemployable!” she told Harper’s Bazaar in February 2011.

          

Daphne is not, we repeat not, eccentric. “I truly hate the word [eccentric]…I’m actually very grounded…Also, eccentrics are almost asexual, and that is not something you can say of me, by any means…What drives me now is the idea of something being against the world. I’m an artist, I suppose.”–New York Times

Daphne has good set of pipes. The heiress even once aspired to becoming an opera singer.

Daphne is a hopeless romantic, especially where her married beau Bernard-Henri Levy is considered. She told Harpers Bazaar in February 2011: “He is quite obviously the love of my life. My greatest sorrow has been the unresolved question of the state of our relationship.”

If you think Daphne looks uncomfortable in those gravity-defying shoes…it’s because she is. On her style, the heiress said in The New Yorker: “Uncomfortable is the name of the game.”

More recent images of Daphne:

{fashionista}