As most great Gothic tales do, the story of The Vampire’s Wife — Susie Cave’s fashion brand that became a go-to for the rich, famous, royals and dress-renters thanks to its feminine gowns with macabre twists — yesterday ended in darkness.
“After 10 years as the creative director of The Vampire’s Wife, it is time for me to say goodbye,” wrote the former model and wife of rock star Nick Cave, on Instagram. A statement on Tuesday confirmed the company, which was founded in 2014 by Cave and friend Alex Adamson, would cease trading with immediate effect. The decision has shocked many.
From the outside, everything appeared to glitter. The rails of Harrods, Selfridges and Harvey Nichols today still shimmer with their remaining stock of Victoriana-esque, iridescent frocks featuring Cave’s slender, pointed-shoulder silhouettes (and £1,000-plus price tags).
Her investors were solid, notably including Jimmy Iovine, founder of Interscope Records and Beats Electronics, whose reported net worth is around $1 billion, alongside his wife, model Liberty Ross. Nick Cave is also a stakeholder, and together they swooped in to help last June, when HMRC petitioned for the liquidation of the company due to unpaid debts. The company bit back with a statement claiming to have “blossomed out of lockdown, converting a loss of £2.1million in 2021 to profit in 2022”, and adding that “its revenue of £3.7 million in 2021 grew to £5.1 million in 2022 and is forecast to be £6.6 million in 2023”.
Plus, there were the girls! Cave’s clientele was peerless, led by a gang of Britain’s most prominent women, often dressed with the help of London PR maven Daisy Hoppen. Sienna Miller, Kate Moss, Florence Welch, Alexa Chung and Rachel Weisz were all pictured in Cave’s designs. “Every time you put on one of her dresses you felt like it was made for you,” actress Greta Bellamacina, a frequent model for the brand, tells the Standard.
Kylie Minogue wore a maroon custom frock to play Glastonbury’s Legends slot in 2019, joining an international fan club which includes Salma Hayek, Greta Gerwig and Dakota Johnson. Thanks to BBC’s Killing Eve, a floral maxi donned by Jodie Comer was later named the “Villanelle” after her character, while the best outputs made it all the way up to the monarchy.
In a moment which consolidated the brand’s ascension, the Princess of Wales made her The Vampire’s Wife debut wearing the emerald Falconetti dress, worth £1,595, to the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin in 2020. The style was named after the French actress Maria Falconetti, and Vogue anointed it the “dress of the decade”. The princess chose to rewear it for her first official joint portrait with Prince William to mark his 40th birthday. Nothing dates the artwork more obviously than the frock-of-the-moment. Friends recall Cave being “ecstatic and genuinely proud” at the time.
So how did a female-founded, tycoon-backed brand selling gowns created by a one-time muse to John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood all come crashing down? In its statement, The Vampire’s Wife blamed “the upheaval in the wholesale market [which] has had dramatic implications for the brand”.
Latest accounts for the last financial year show that while sales did increase from £3.3 million to almost £5.1 million, the business remained stuck in the red. Pre-tax losses reduced from £2.69 million in 2021 to just £16,000 last year. However, the accounts also show that the business owed Nick Cave £120,000 at the year end, and had total liabilities of £3.9 million.
The announcement comes less than three months after retailer Matches Fashion went into administration following its £52 million sale to Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group in December, which plunged London’s fashion industry into chaos. This month, designer Roksanda Ilinčić only managed to stop her label from going into administration by finding a “white knight” buyer.
Matches’ demise will have been a blow to Cave’s brand, which launched with the retailer in 2014. The Vampire’s Wife is still owed £32,250 from Matches, according to administrators, while the prospect of a lack of future orders from them will have created a deficit in the books.
It is heartbreaking news to Natalie Kingham, the former global fashion buying director for Matches, who placed the order which kickstarted The Vampire’s Wife. “I can’t remember the size of that first order, but it was enough for her to start — so I’m sure it was an exciting moment,” she says. “I do recall the first time Susie came into the offices at The Shard looking drop-dead gorgeous, with some sketches and some fabrics. The DNA of the brand and the lasting silhouette was there from day one. Women just loved wearing her dresses.”
Stylist Bay Garnett puts Cave’s rise as a fashion designer down to “her ability to filter the best out of vintage and turn it into timeless clothes for anyone to wear today. The [Falconetti dress] took on the Galaxy dress moment that Roland Mouret had, where a dress goes exponential and has its own life,” she says. “Longevity can be a struggle when a dress becomes bigger than the brand itself. Once it stops feeling like a brilliant one-off, the magic can go.”
Many potential customers were simply priced out, but the boom of online fashion rental sites in recent years coincided with the brand’s growth in popularity — not necessarily a good thing. “The Vampire’s Wife has remained in the top three of our best performing brands since we first listed it four years ago,” says Sacha Newall, co-founder of My Wardrobe HQ. This is echoed at By Rotation, where “our users have found it more price-accessible to rent for three days for 10 per cent of its retail value,” says Eshita Kabra-Davies, founder and CEO. “A particular lender has made over four times back on the retail value of a dress they have rented out more than 25 times.” This was ultimately never cash in the brand’s pocket.
But for Cave herself, The Vampire’s Wife was as much an entrepreneurial venture as it was a method of processing intense grief. In July 2015, soon after its launch, Nick and Susie lost their 15-year-old son, Arthur, when he died falling from a cliff after trying LSD. During Andrew Dominik’s 2016 documentary One More Time With Feeling, which followed Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds creating their 16th album, she explains: “Since everything that happened, my work has become something different. Before, it was something I was doing because I enjoyed it, but after, it became a real necessity. It was the only thing that took my mind off everything.”
On Tuesday, Cave reiterated this point in a farewell blog post written on The Vampire’s Wife website. “It has been a deep privilege to be a part of this magical thing — a project that quite literally saved my life. Perhaps, in the end, ten years is long enough. I don’t know.”
The Vampire’s Wife has hosted parties in members’ club Loulou’s, filled the backstage of Victoria Park’s All Points East festival with It-girls wearing gowns, and flooded the boxes of the Royal Albert Hall during Nick Cave’s concerts. Its final choice of venue is less glamorous — Mayfair’s sample sale spot, The Music Room. Doors for the “goodbye” sale will open to the public on May 24 to 26 following a VIP pre-sale. You can bet the brand’s final guestlist is the hottest one in town. Fangs will be required in the battle for entry — you couldn’t imagine Cave having it any other way.
