Style and Stuff

 Due to a little Huffington Post-ing and New Yorker-ing last night, I discovered the Honorable Daphne Guiness whom everyone is calling a "style icon." She just put her clothes collection on display at the F.I.T in New York (check it out here).

I have to say there is something strangely fascinating about her and I can understand why she inspires some enthusiastic fan blogs and is consistently referred to as a chameleon--I've watched enough America's Next Top Model to know that that is a good thing. I think all the fan sites should focus more on the wrapping than the person--why do they never talk about who she's wearing? The designers are the artists. I suppose she could be a muse...


As an art historian, I read a lot about "artist's muses." Unfortunately, the muse/lover/model is the only role women have in art history until pretty recently. After reading about all these muses though, I'm a little unimpressed with Daphne Guiness. She's heir to the Guiness fortune, and the daughter of a duke (thus the "Honorable" title). Although she did have an affair with the French philosopher Levy--a must for a muse--and left the homestead to do something rash when she was very young (she married a Greek guy, who her parents disapproved of), she's just soooo rich. I'm a little sick of the struggling, eccentric artist cliche, but it's a little easier to believe a commitment to art (fashion in this case) when you have to first quit your day job. I think it's possible this "Honorable" woman gets away with her choices because she has a fancy title and no budget cap. I know fashion is expensive, but I'm reminded of my favorite "muse," the Baroness Elsa who broke the rules of fashion and art.

Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven hung out with the German and American Dadaists in the twenties and thirties in Europe and New York. Really, Elsa and Daphne aren't so different: fancy titles, affairs with French philosophers, young marriages and abandoned families. But, Elsa used to collect her favorite garments from the NY streets and create her own, fantasmic, outfits--she was a Dadaist herself. My favorite of her accessories was a canary hat, with a live canary, but she also wore a tomato soup can bra (before Warhol was born, I might add), teaspoon earrings, lots of black lipstick and a bouncing spring, which she hung from her hip and let swish. She also once shaved her head and covered it in laquer (which is cooler than the Frankenstein wife doo, I think). The Baroness had hundreds of lovers, escaped arrest multiple times and made the stuffy French expatriots thoroughly uncomfortable. Her advances may have inspired Marcel Duchamps' returning to France--she also may have suggested that he try using a urinal as art. Hmmmm...

                               Elsa died under suspicious circumstances in a Paris apartment in 1927 after going a little crazy--like a good artist should. :)

Perhaps any blog post, that requires me to pull out my class notes from last year won't be to interesting to you, blog reader, but I'd just like to think about the woman with the tomato soup bra as the true "style icon," not the rich heiress who buys other people's soup bras. Then again, I just spent more time looking at Daphne Guiness pictures...