10 Must-See Archive Fashion Looks From the Daphne Guinness Archive: YSL, Chanel, McQueen and More!

I'm Alex Fury and I worked with Daphne Guinness and Nick Knight on the video for hip neck spine um the idea for the video really came on the one hand from Daphne's Music and on the other hand from Nick's ideas and those ideas came from listening to the song and reacting to the song when I first met with Nick can he spoke to me about the music video he talked about the idea that the sound of the music actually kind of began in a kind of orchestral kind of way which to him felt a little bit kind o

f early 20th century and then at the chorus shifted to this kind of disco beat and he was really interested in trying to produce a video that captured that shift in the music that shift in time and in trying to tell that story through fashion um and when you're trying to tell a story through fashion with Daphne Guinness it's very obvious to look at Daphne herself and to look at Daphne's clothes and to try and tell the story through the pieces that she's collected and the the kind of extraordinar

y clothes that she wears um so when we first started talking about that we came up with this idea of kind of moving between the 1930s and the 1970s um and there's something very interesting in that because the 1970s are a period there are enormously influenced by the 1930s if you look at the clothes of uh Aussie Clark certain clothes by Yves Saint Laurent and a lot of the clothes that Carl Lagerfeld produced at Chloe they're very much influenced by the kind of the the Styles and silhouettes of t

he 1930s the kind of bias cutting spiral cutting those sort of wide Palazzo trousers this kind of General sort of language and and also the whole idea of Glamor which is something that really originated in 1930s Hollywood um and I think looking at that for a music video is also super interesting because the 1930s other period when kind of talking pictures talkies first emerged it's the first time people started to hear sound in movies um so I think referencing that for a music video is kind of a

you know it's something quite automatic it's something quite natural um when we started to talk about this Daphne and I we really gravitated towards marlona Dietrich who is someone that I've been obsessed with since I was a teenager and someone that Daphne loves as well um and I started to think of these the kind of Hollywood epics that Dietrich um produced alongside the director Joseph Von Sternberg they produced seven films together one in Germany and six in Hollywood that really kind of ceme

nted Her Image as this kind of icon of early 20th Century Cinema um and they also really kind of defined that idea of Glamor you know very very early on and interestingly it's still these kind of ideas and archetypes that that stay with us today um another thing that I found very interesting about their kind of symbiotic working relationship is the fact that Joseph Von Sternberg would talk to Dietrich about how he was going to shoot her and then Dietrich would work with Travis Banton Who was the

ahead of Paramount films costume Department to kind of devise costumes that would reflect the shots so it was this kind of push pull kind of creative dialogue between Dietrich and Von Sternberg that made those films so kind of extraordinary and I was thinking when we kind of set off to do this video about a phrase that Joseph Von Sternberg used about the sixth film that they made together which was called The Scarlet empress and he called that film a Relentless Excursion into style and I kind o

f thought that's what this video should be it's really about kind of embracing kind of style embracing fashion and really trying to reflect this kind of idea of transformation throughout the video but unlike the other videos that Daphne's done it's not about her kind of assuming a character or playing a character it's kind of different facets of Daphne different personas within herself she never turns into another person but it's kind of a heightened idea of her own self and the way that she dre

sses going back to that kind of Dietrich Von Sternberg idea Nick said that he wanted the opening shot to be uh kind of a a tracking shot that would come from very high up in the studio and kind of come down to focus on Daphne um and so when he started to talk about that when Daphne and I were working on the clothes we knew that there had to be a kind of sense of height and of scale and this idea of something that will be able to be kind of seen from very far away um and thinking back to the 1930

s there are all these kind of images of you know Ziegfeld Showgirls um you know kind of extravagant headpieces and I actually was thinking of a very famous illustration by ertay which everybody kind of knows it's it's the woman kind of leading a greyhound she has a again kind of a feather headdress on and three Fox Furs draped across from one arm it's it's this kind of archetypal 1920s 30s fashion illustration um and really what Daphne wound up wearing was very much a kind of direct reflection o

f that and of those ideas um she's really kind of elongated and attenuated because she's wearing her kind of norataka heels I always say you don't need to put Daphne on a pedestal because she puts herself on one um and to kind of further exaggerate this idea of height she's wearing a dress by um Balenciaga it's a Lycra dress that has about a six foot train that we kind of whipped around her again in emulation of that Earth Day drawing um to exaggerate that sense of proportion even more she's wea

ring a python Bolero by asadinalaya that really cuts the body very high up and gives this sense of kind of elongation and the headpiece is a specially commissioned headpiece by Stephen Jones and it's got a bit of a kind of Valkyrie Wagner kind of operatic feel to it which really fits the kind of opening swell of the orchestra on hip neck spine I also love the fact that we're moving into a kind of black and white universe but you have a little bit of color in the kind of um Peach tones of the ost

rich feathers and when we were kind of assembling this outfit it's obviously as I said made to be seen from very far far away so it's about this kind of black graphic silhouette but at the same time there was a sense that it needed something a little bit more it needed something to kind of break the silhouette a little bit so on one hip there is um a brooch by Christian Lacroix from one of his Oak Couture collections from the early 2000s and Daphne wears it as a choker so it's actually attached

to a piece of um satin ribbon and we pinned it on the hip and we kind of left the ribbon dangling as a you know kind of a bit of a gesture to Couture but also this idea of kind of something slightly imperfect something a little bit off in the silhouette um and I do like the fact that you can't really see it here but you know up close you had a very kind of different interaction and reaction to this outfit and it felt that it needed some kind of Sparkle and also kind of a reminder of the sort of

physiology of the body that you needed something to kind of denote where certain kind of points of emphasis on the body were and that was really what that kind of Broach did for this outfit the second outfit we're moving into it kind of um it expresses one of the main ideas of the video which is this kind of Shifting between black and white that's an obvious reflection of um kind of black and white movies but it's also this sense of being able to change mood and kind of change Feeling by switchi

ng between these different colors so whenever we use black it's um it tends to be graphic and sharp it's got a very kind of distinct outline um but when we're using white it's something that's much more gentle and soft um this white outfit is um Chanel Oak Couture it's from spring summer 2004 and the jacket was originally worn by Naja auman on the catwalk um and the thing that was kind of amazing about this and when we're addressing Daphne in this is you really get a sense of what Oak Couture me

ans um the jacket is this sort of mass of white Ruffles and then it knocks around the body with a pink ribbon and it looks very sort of um instinctive and spontaneous but actually the Rhythm fastens with tiny press studs down the left-hand side and we were trying to fasten the jacket and it was only when you kind of slid the ribbon over the right rib that everything kind of lined up and you understood the kind of precision of that Couture fit to be able to to make it kind of to be able to Anchor

it exactly into place on on kind of a precise point of the body um so this is kind of as I said like soft Daphne and really in when we're using the kind of the white pale sections of this it's it's very much kind of a lingerie feel there's a delicacy um there's a sort of sweetness to some of this and again it's that idea of kind of switching between different personas different sides of the same character and it's also a reference slightly away from Dietrich towards people like Jean Harlow in 1

930s Hollywood and you know to all those kind of sort of post Haze code kind of fabulous negligee's that people had to wear as kind of a sort of intimation of of nudity or an intimation of sex when nothing could actually be shown um further to that underneath this Daphne is actually wearing a flesh-colored bodysuit covered in crystals by Deborah Milner and there were a number of different bodysuits used in this shoot and the whole idea was for them to be a kind of idealized idea of nudity um and

to return to Marlena Dietrich they really reminded me of the kind of outfits that Dietrich used to wear in the 1950s when she was doing her cabaret shows and the Hollywood Costume designer Jean Louis devised these series of naked dresses for her which are made out of a fabric called souffle which has since been outlawed because it's incredibly flammable and highly dangerous but basically it was this kind of gossamer fabric that you could kind of smother the body in and it would kind of vanish i

nto the body and Dietrich had these dresses that were kind of beaded to kind of give a sort of idealized nude illusion and with Daphne basically that's what we put under everything so there's always this kind of sense of the body and of the skin but again it's it's kind of heightened it's given a sense of Glamor it's encrusted with crystals so it's almost kind of emitting its own light um and that's something that kind of anchors every outfit for the video this outfit is another piece of Chanel

Oak Couture but rather than coming from a specific collection this one was designed by Daphne along with Carl Lagerfeld and the Chanel ateliers um I love this particular outfit or this particular jacket because it's um it kind of ends up sort of traversing all of these different terrains in terms of times and references you know I look at it and you can kind of see you know like a 16th century Court male Court costume it looks like kind of doublet of nose um from the court of Elizabeth the first

there's also kind of a reference to the 18th century it looks a little bit like something that Sarah Bernard would have worn in the late 19th century and then also it's referencing that kind of 1930s tradition of women dressing as men something that Malena Dietrich very famously did um you know she wore um top top hat and tales while performing in films like Morocco and Blonde Venus um and also she wore trousers on the street and there were all these kind of rumors that she was going to be arre

sted when she went to Paris because women were not allowed to wear men's clothes out on the streets although that never actually happened um so there's all of these kind of ideas coming together in this the the jacket is you know Couture the kind of breeches are Diamante leggings by Gucci by Alessandra mccayley um and we also wanted to kind of give a bit of a kind of historical even a slightly feminine Touch by tying these ribbons around their elbows um and I also like that it's kind of a gestur

e towards what Daphne wears every day you know she she kind of calls it her mandrag when she goes to work in the studios a lot of the time she will dress in a tail coat by Huntsman and her top hat because she's going into very kind of natural masculine environments and she feels that she needs to wear something quite kind of tough and hard um you know it's that very interesting idea that lots of people have of clothes as armor and I think you really kind of see that reflected here I also love th

ese bracelets which are vintage Pauline trujere and the idea that they're kind of again a little bit of a gesture to the 18th century they kind of looked like the sort of lace cuffs that you would see in portraits of kind of Louis XIV or something and then projecting it into the future again is the kind of visor headpiece which is by Philip Tracy so really it's about this kind of backwards and forwards through time with this outfit it's a kind of graphic dark silhouette um with a lot of kind of

glitter to catch the light and really attract attention now interestingly in this outfit I'm not sure if you can actually see it but those Gucci leggings from the previous look have been kind of requisitioned and they're worn underneath the dress here which is by Gareth Pew and is made out of shredded gray Georgette um and through this shoot there was this idea of kind of putting glitter undergarments so you know whether it was kind of a diamante body suit or a crystal body suit or these legging

s this idea of an under layer of glitter under something that's slightly kind of transparent so it's almost as if the body is glowing inside of the garments um the treatment Nick has given this is really reminiscent of the work of Horst and for me host was a really key reference in terms of assembling these outfits those kind of horse or Cecil beaten pictures from the 1930s which I found very interesting because they often kind of situated the models within a kind of architectural setting they w

ere never kind of floating in free space there was always some kind of a uh even even if it was kind of an intonation or a heightened version of reality around them those always something to kind of anchor them into a real space and I think there's very much that idea kind of emerging in the video here and you know you you get the outfits in a sense reflecting those photographs also which had a lot of kind of Sparkle reflective surfaces um satin sequins this is the first piece by Lee Alexander M

cQueen in the video it's um the a sequined frock coat which actually began Life as a dress and it's from the spring summer 2008 show LA dumb blur which was dedicated to Isabella blow who was of course Lima Queen's mentor and one of Daphne's friends um Daphne had the dress adapted into this frock coat which is normally worn quite open but for this video we actually adapted it again and kind of cinched it at the waist because the silhouette needed some kind of definition for it to really register

on camera and it's and here with another of those Christians oh could you approaches the necklace is also by Lacroix um and again it's this idea of kind of creating a sort of graphic silhouette but here with a lot of Sparkle um and really trying to create something that that's this kind of long attenuated sharp silhouette but with kind of different surface textures we're now shifting into the chorus of hit next spine um and that is this kind of shift from those kind of aforementioned 1930s influ

enced images and outfits into something that's much more uh expressive of the 1970s and this kind of disco feeling um the dress here is Jean Paul Gautier it's from spring summer 2004. um Daphne actually talked about the fact that she had wanted to dye this black because she felt that she'd get more kind of wear out of it because she's not she doesn't wear color very often but I think this looks really fantastic and obviously we've shifted from black and white into full color and it's not just th

at kind of shift but I would say a kind of shift of mood a shift of movement as well the clothes here have become much more kind of free-flowing there's a lot more movement in the dresses we've moved away from this kind of very sharp silhouette into something that's kind of much softer and Freer ironically the the feather Cape that she's wearing over her left shoulder is actually a vintage 1930s cape and we just put it there because it's this as soon as you start to inject color you want to use

more color especially when it's contrasting with an entirely kind of monochrome start to the video um and the eyepiece is a butterfly eyepiece made out of feathers by Philip Tracy you can also see here that there is a again a crystal bodysuit underneath this and the um scarves are Daphne's own she often wears them kind of crisscrossed around her body um but we started to use them as kind of uh as bracelets almost but the whole idea is that they could kind of flow they could give movement um they

could kind of hide an expression so again it's this idea of kind of exaggeration emphasis really trying to when we're moving away from something so kind of sharp and static really trying to give a lot of movement a lot of kind of dynamism and Locomotion when we move into the chorus um and Daphne wore her hair down which she doesn't normally do either but I think you know again it's it's this kind of disco Diva slightly uh almost Diana Ross kind of feeling to this section really to give just a l

ot more a very different kind of sensibility to to the opening of the song which is quite sort of strict and restrained and then all of a sudden at the chorus you're able to kind of let free the second outfit from this first chorus is um another McQueen piece this is incredibly important McQueen piece um it's a black sequin dress from the Horn of Plenty with a hood lined in red sequins um and a headpiece which is from the Autumn winter 2003 um McQueen collection called scanners so again it's kin

d of mixing together these different uh different periods um but the whole idea is slightly a return to this this sort of kind of graphicism this this kind of sharpness that we saw at the start of the video um but I think with the kind of the sequins and the color and the light treatment you get more of this kind of disco 70s feeling to this particular outfit you also get a little bit of a kind of 80s feel and also a little bit 1930s there are kind of references to kind of Adrian who was the uh

who's Travis banton's great um rival the head costume designer of MGM who used to design for John Crawford um and you get this kind of sense of sort of the built up shoulders this real kind of 1930s sort of Diva feeling in this outfit uh it's very much about this kind of strong powerful woman and again that was something that was very much being referenced in the 1970s that that which is that kind of cusp of 30s 40s when the shoulders were evident and Silhouettes were slightly shifting it's some

thing that you saw you've done the wrong referencing a great deal when he did his 1940s collection in 1971 and then it started to kind of influence designers all the way through and really it's interesting because that's when you saw the silhouette of the 80s starting to emerge but all of those designers particularly Saint Laurent had an enormous influence on McQueen he always said he wanted his women to look strong and he often did that through Silhouettes like this with and kind of emphatic sh

oulders um very kind of strong sharp Silhouettes and so for me this it's interesting because it's this outfit that manages to kind of Traverse and reference both sections of the video and both eras that we're trying to evoke it's slightly earlier than the 1930s but a film that we talked a lot about and I think a film that you automatically talk a great deal about whenever you're trying to do something kind of retro futuristic and referencing those kind of interwar periods was Fritz Lang's Metrop

olis it was a reference that Laurel used for the hair a great deal and you can kind of tell when you're looking at the video that the hair isn't blonde you know it's silver it's gold it's it's metallicized and varnished so it it which in a way is actually interesting because it's something that um people did in the 1920s and 30s there was this whole Vogue for kind of Couture's producing wigs made out of kind of exotic colored hair or even made out of metal it was a real kind of fad at that point

in time and that's something that Lauren was was very kind of openly referencing um and also something that kind of um Terry Barber the makeup artist was referencing in terms of the very kind of heightened macchiage all the way through which is very reminiscent of 1930s films where you know for a lip to look red on black and white film often it was blue or even black um but going back to kind of metropolis as as a reference this is a McQueen bodysuit from the Autumn winter 2007 collection um in

memory of Elizabeth Howe which was about a kind of meeting of witches and ancient Egypt which was inspired at least in part by the fact that McQueen had an ancestor who was involved in the seven Witch Trials um so he produced this incredible bodysuit which obviously does have kind of um ancient Egyptian uh connotations to it but we took that out of context and I think placed into into this scenario and within this video there is kind of a reference to the man machine um from from Metropolis whi

ch is interesting because it again is is this idea of kind of the future scene from the past um and I think that's really fascinating to kind of explore whenever you're looking at these kind of specific time references it's interesting to see what they thought the future was going to be um and and their kind of visions of the future and also how kind of close that actually came to reality throughout this video there were kind of very um I would say strict criteria around the different sections y

ou know in terms of color palette in terms of how the clothes had to move this idea of switching between black and white and kind of Technicolor but at the same time when we were going through Daphne's pieces when I was looking through her wardrobe and trying to curate these outfits with her there were certain kind of looks that you saw that you knew would just be kind of wonderful even if they kind of sat outside of these kind of General ideas of of the of the video um and Daphne has this incre

dible Cape which is from McQueen's Autumn winter 2002 collection uh called supercalifragilistic Expialidocious um and you just knew that this would kind of look incredible in Motion in this video um so it was something that we had to put in and in a sense it was kind of a challenge I guess to Nick to give him this amazing garment and see how he could make it work within the kind of structure that he'd envisaged for the video um the headpiece is by Philip Tracy and knowing that we would obviously

be kind of blowing wind into this cape there wasn't a way you weren't going to use this this cape and have a wind machine behind it I love that the kind of headpiece emulated this idea of kind of flowing material but in kind of static it's um horse hair kind of molded around the face and then studied with tiny crystals and underneath the outfit Daphne is is wearing a McQueen bodysuit from the spring summer 2004 collection so again it's this kind of amalgamation of different eras of McQueen and

it's moving away from that idea of kind of outfits in sort of Glorious color in these chorus sections but again you have this kind of incredible sense of movement and of drama and you know it's also interesting when you're thinking about this this video is being kind of operatic because there definitely is something incredibly operatic to the movement of this cave into this whole kind of setup of this shot one of the first things I saw um when I was going through Daphne's wardrobe with her was t

his bodysuit which is a kind of mirrored Plexiglas bodysuit um by Tom Ford and basically as soon as I saw this I sent a video of it to Nick and said I've just found this you can bounce lasers off it um and that's exactly what he did which was very kind of satisfying but I think when you're talking about um the 70s and disco and glitter balls and things like that you're kind of automatically you know you're automatically going to come to the idea of a glitter ball and you're automatic you know an

d if you're able to kind of turn a human being into that glitter ball then you know that feels like something kind of special it feels like you're kind of taking the idea to its kind of apotheosis I also like the idea that again this has all of these references backwards so it has the reference to kind of metropolis it has the references to those dresses that Malena Dietrich wore and even for me it also kind of references the clothes that Cher was wearing in the 1970s and there's something very

interesting in another kind of word circuitous route of kind of connecting the 30s in Dietrich to the 70s um the is that Bob Mackey who created those dresses for Cher actually trained with Jean Louis who made the new dresses for Milena Dietrich so that's where he kind of learned the idea of creating this kind of Illusion of kind of idealized nakedness um and apparently Marlene Dietrich was really outraged when Cher started to wear those dresses and you know she was asking if she could sue becaus

e you know they were her dresses and she designed those dresses with with Jean Louis and she felt like they were her kind of intellectual copyright um but I like that that within this it's a very kind of modern version of that but you have all of these references kind of backwards and forwards between these different areas and these different styles um and I also like that again it gives you a kind of very graphic silhouette it's very much about the body about the form um as opposed to kind of e

xtrapolating away from it everything in this video kind of is is really about kind of framing the body and about framing Daphne in the best way possible we've kind of chosen 10 outfits to talk about from this video and this is the final outfit um and yeah I think when we've been talking about Mylanta Dietrich all the way through this and the most kind of natural conclusion to that for me was to actually dress Daphne Guinness as Marlena Dietrich when Marlena Dietrich started her kind of uh Cabare

t career in the 1950s she really kind of experimented with a lot of different um looks she experimented with a lot of kind of different formulations of this idea of naked dresses and then very quickly it kind of solidified into a real formula which was the idea that she would wear this kind of nude beaded dress with um an enormous swans down coat over the top and it was always said that 20 000 swans had lost the feathers of her off their breasts willingly for her to wear this coat um and then ba

sically she would wear the the coat over the dress when she was singing songs at the start of her set which were very kind of um raucous and entertaining and strong and then when she would go into the more fragile kind of ballads like where where have all the flowers gone she would kind of shed the swans down coat and appear vulnerable um so towards the end of this video this is one of the last shots I like the idea that having kind of referenced Dietrich again and again then Daphne kind of beca

me Dietrich at the end um and she coincidentally had this kind of swans down coat that Deborah Milner had made for her um it was obviously created in emulation of of those amazing Dietrich coats um but it was great to use it in this way she's wearing a kind of nude beaded McQueen dress underneath so this is the most kind of overt and um direct homage to Marlena Dietrich another thing that I love is that the first film Elena Dietrich starred in The Blue Angel was in 1929 and her last film was jus

t a Gigolo which was in the 70s so there is this idea that in terms of as a figure she actually spans the entire time that we were kind of talking about and referencing in this and she is of course this kind of Touchstone for Daphne it's someone that Daphne kind of doors and she's somebody that I adore as well um so it felt very kind of natural that in the end you know having kind of examined all of these different kind of personas within herself Daphne would kind of you know become more energy

drink I thought that was very kind of an apt conclusion to the video