Did Nick Move to New York to Become a Fashion Designer
S usie Cave'southward Brighton kitchen is painted a very specific bruised-peach pink and the reflected colour on her skin makes it look equally though she's carved from soap. Until she married musician Nick Cavern, she was Susie Bick, the 90s model discovered past lensman Steven Meisel on a flight to New York at fourteen years quondam. David Bailey took her under his wing and her very white skin and very black hair helped shape a career that saw her on the comprehend of two Roxy Music records, shot for ad campaigns, including Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior, and naked on the catwalk in Robert Altman'due south Prêt-à-Porter. Hers was one of those fabled stories – she was a girl who felt out of place, and so hitchhiked away from her Devonshire boarding school on a milk float to find glamour and fame. "I spent nearly of my life running away on milk floats," she smiles today. As a teenager, "I was, umm, wilful. At fifteen I caught a plane to Japan with 20p in my pocket. Made loads of coin. Came back all grown up!" The people she met along the fashion, as if tin men and lions, helped shape the woman she became, and then, in 2014, the make she launched. Now, at 54, there is simply a fine line betwixt the two; a concealed zip.
Susie'south friend Bella Freud introduced her to Nick in the shadow of a dinosaur skeleton at the V&A Museum subsequently hours. The first fourth dimension he saw her (Cave says, in the 2014 moving-picture show 20,000 Days on Globe), he saw, "All the things I'd obsessed over for all the years": Marilyn Monroe, Suzi Quatro, "Tinker Bell trapped in the drawer, Carolyn Jones dying in Elvis'due south arms and Jackie O in mourning." Viewed from here, their entwined careers read similar love messages to each other, but ones and then passionate they have broken their banks and spilled out into the globe. They married in 1999. On their honeymoon she became pregnant with twins, and in 2014, when Earl and Arthur were teenagers, she launched the Vampire'due south Wife, named after ane of Cave'southward unfinished novels. Today, Nick is responsible for naming the dresses, choosing fabrics and occasionally modelling alongside them.
The first piece I saw, shortly after the brand launched, was a jewelled amuse bracelet, each charm based on one of Cave'south songs, and I remember thinking it must be the most expensive piece of fan fine art ever made. 1 of the charms was Nick's red right hand, another was a tiny gilt church building – if you opened the door you could come across the two of them getting married. It yet strikes me as obsessive and intimate, a version of someone doodling their hereafter married man's proper name on their homework diary. Of form, I loved information technology on sight. Theirs was a family formed out of poems and rubies.
In the summer of 2015, Arthur Cave died after falling from a cliff near their habitation in Brighton. What'southward the worst that tin can happen? This. The worst thing that can happen, happened to the Cave family unit. For a while they were quiet, moving slowly through that syrupy grief. Then, somehow, they emerged with a new language to discuss it; in Nick's Cerise Hand Files he responded to a grieving fan with the realisation there is a fashion, "not out of grief, only deep within it". "Susie'south grief," Nick wrote, "has become role of her chemistry, information technology moves through her bloodstream like a force and though she often inhabits the liminal space at the edge of dreams, she remains strong in her powerlessness and obstinately awed by the workings of the world." 3 months after their son's death, the model Daisy Lowe called, asking for a cherry party dress. Susie dragged herself out of bed to find the cloth and with information technology (a fine scarlet velvet she lined with silk) establish a new sort of energy. "A lifeline." She went to work and, since then, has rarely stopped.
"The globe has been a unlike place for me for five years," she says, slowly, her hair a glossy shield; she is well known for her shyness, a trait that simply adds to her mucilaginous mystique. "So everything has felt surreal and strange and not normal for a while. Fifty-fifty before Covid, I kind of lived like this already, in a sort of alternate universe, together with other grieving people. To create my apparel brings me boggling joy. To be engaged in the creative process keeps me live. It is a survival strategy. It helps me enormously. And then I feel very fortunate that people seem to like what I do. I'thousand happy to make beautiful things that people enjoy wearing." Is she blushing? On Zoom, the bespeak stutters.
"I've known Susie since I was sixteen," Kate Moss tells me over email. "She was always my favourite model and the virtually glamorous woman I had ever met. At present she makes clothes that are otherworldly, timeless and and so flattering to article of clothing." Kate remembers existence backstage at one of Nick'south concerts at Victoria Park in London, "and all the girls were wearing Susie dresses – nosotros became the Vampire's Wife cult, it was major." "Susie dresses", typically, are body-skimming and jewel-bright, in velvet corduroy, lace, or slippery silk, with a hem that falls just beneath the knee. The shoulders are tweaked into a snippy little point. The lightness of fabric ways that when you step into one you experience a pleasant shiver, like a true cat being stroked.
At Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's 2018 wedding, 3 guests wore Vampire's Wife dresses. They fit both pop stars and royals: the Falconetti – high-necked, ruffled, ofttimes seen in shimmering shades of dying mermaid – was worn by Kate Middleton and Princess Beatrice. Before Susie actually knew what was happening, she had created what Vogue called, "the dress of the decade".
When I contacted a few of the Vampire'south Wife's fans, the women whose red carpet portraits and way mag covers accept made the dresses famous, they all replied not just with details of how they dearest the clothes, simply how they dear the dress because the wearing apparel are infused with an essence of Susie herself. "Her creations are just as beautiful and special equally she is," messaged Keira Knightley. "Wearing her dresses is an occasion in itself, total of magic and decadence." Maya Rudolph agrees. "Her dresses make me feel like a woman. And a witchy 1 at that! It's that silhouette, but it's more than that – I think she weaves some sort of magic into them. They are so dreamy."
Florence Welch, who wears the Vampire's Married woman both on and off stage, told me she feels a kinship with Susie. "I think we both inhabit a dream earth, just have found a way to pull those dreams into reality. I recognise in her the strength that takes. To commit wholly to your artful vision regardless of what people consider 'stylish' or ephemeral trends. In that location's a destructive femininity to her creations that really speaks to me." The clothes, she says, make her experience darkly romantic. "I recollect the most cute things have a strangeness to them and her dresses seem to have walked out of a gothic fantasy. 1 that is entirely Susie's."
During the pandemic the Vampire's Wife has been producing face masks, also, many of which present more than every bit objects of kinky seduction than Covid protection, and supplying them to the Royal Sussex Canton Hospital and local hospices. At present, every dress has a matching face mask; they feel oddly correct, silky bits of manner rather than medical accessories. Every bit with all Susie'southward designs, "The cease in listen is always beauty. I want the person wearing the wearing apparel to exist their most beautiful, their near comfy, to well-nigh be transported, to feel sort of… encased in dazzler. To escape." She is fond of organza, for example, because it, "literally looks like you're floating". She uses florals, merely ones that are a lilliputian bit off, with the sense they'd thrive graveside.
Invited to collaborate on a drove for H&M in 2020, she says: "I had the same things in listen, then everyone could feel graceful and fairytale-similar." It sold out in 24 hours. "Yes, information technology'southward growing into a sort of… not a cult, but…" She has an alert on her phone for when someone uses a Vampire's Wife hashtag, and information technology gives her a thrill each fourth dimension. "I feel a very personal connection to them from the new young actresses to the people making little films of themselves. And, you know, every time, I feel moved." She must prepare then, for her phone to start buzzing.
After complimenting a Vampire's Wife apparel worn by his wife, the model Liberty Ross, Jimmy Iovine (the billionaire entrepreneur behind Beats headphones) bought a majority stake in the brand. They're on track, reports Business of Fashion, to increase acquirement by 30% twelvemonth on year. "Susie," said Iovine, "is as much of an artist equally the smashing women I've worked with, including Stevie Nicks and Patti Smith." Is it possible to proceed the art – the gentle darkness of the dresses, their other-worldly gothic restraint – if Susie releases the reins to American investors, allowing it to grow beyond what she calls, "A family unit business, truly"?
"I wouldn't want it to be so big that it would lose its essence," she says, slowly. "I'yard very, very protective of the make, I've been asked to practise a lot of things that I've said no to, because I simply really want to go along it very true to what it is." Which is? "I'1000 motivated by beauty. And everything I make has to be something I would wear. Absolutely, it can be difficult – every twenty-four hour period is a battle to keep it as it is." Instead of following the traditional seasons and catwalk shows, Susie was inspired by the skatewear brands her sons wore, and drips designs online monthly, in limited quantities. The manner world today, she says, is "unrecognisable" from the one she entered as a teenager. "When I was modelling all those years agone, the industry was very small. Nosotros were a customs. There is a lot of bad talk near the industry these days, but I never had anything but skilful experiences, working with mind-blowingly talented and very supportive people. I was lost, and the mode industry took me in and gave me a dwelling."
The plan with Iovine is to offer more affordable pieces (a typical Vampire's Wife wearing apparel costs more than £one,000), besides as brand extensions including knit loungewear, handbags and home goods. It's not impossible that the bruised pink of her kitchen wall will ane day reappear on your bed clothes, or bathroom towel. And every bit the Vampire'due south Wife grows, so does Nick Cave's new venture, Cave Things, an online store of such objects equally sticker sheets, wrapping newspaper and a jumper for dogs that says "Suck My Dick".
"My imagination is based in folk art, fairy tales, mystical things. And, you know," she smiles, "information technology gets a lilliputian bit scary in there. There's dazzler, simply infused with a sort of darkness." Where does she recollect that comes from? "This is something I take dealt with all of my life, a sense of impending ending, a dark strength on the boundary of my vision. I attempt to use this darkness to create cute and soulful things. And I'1000 e'er very curious nearly… unusual things. Covid has allowed me to really indulge that side of myself. Considering, well, in that location'due south zero else to do."
The web log page of the Vampire's Wife website showcases her many curiosities, contempo posts having included Renoir'southward nudes, a clip of a Maya Angelou poem, the final paragraph of a James Joyce story and a generous scattering of Nick Cave ephemera, a digital moodboard of muses. She, of course, has often been described as a muse herself, having inspired photographers (Helmut Newton), designers (Azzedine Alaïa) and musicians (whenever Prince was in London, he'd send her roses) all her life, but the concept still rankles. "To exist honest, I notice the word muse to exist a little demeaning. I haven't actually got fourth dimension to exist anyone'southward muse. However, I am a frequent visitor in my husband's songs, I seem to be e'er walking in and out of them. His songs await afterwards me. And if I am to exist a muse, then I am his and he is mine."
Through lockdown, Susie took downward each of the hundreds of images she had pinned to her office walls one by one. She painted the room white and idea almost where to beginning once more. Today there are only 2 pieces of newspaper left. The beginning is a photo of Isabel Adjani in One Mortiferous Summertime, dark haired, white necked, familiar. The second is a lyric from one of the many songs her husband has written about her: "Beauty is gonna save the world." "This line has become my personal mantra," she says, earnestly. "I intend to save the world, ane dress at a time."
The Vampire's Wife Collection 12 is bachelor at thevampireswife.com
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