“Music was my reaction to grief.” So speaks Daphne Guinness, doyenne of British fashion, on a rainy afternoon in Abbey Road Studios, home to the UK’s music industry for close to a century — and now to her too.
Guinness started recording music after her brother Jasper, a horticulturalist, died of cancer in 2011. She found herself in Ireland, cut off from everyone. She poured out poetry and songs that would form the basis for her 2016 debut, Optimist, in Black. “I’ve never stopped since,” she says. Her new album, Sleep, is out in November. It’s her most ambitious work so far: a capacious collection with songs about time, Japan and Russia. “Written before the invasion,” she clarifies. “There have been hundreds of people involved.” Guinness has never been one for minimalism — she is known to throw on Maison Margiela the way another person might slip into Adidas.
