People have some wild ideas about Daphne Guinness, but the oddest one she’s ever seen, on Wikipedia, stated that she was in league with the devil. The evidence? The strange, hoof shapes of her favoured platform shoes that she wears everywhere. “But they’d also managed to find a picture of me drinking tomato juice, so they claimed that it was the blood of children and that I was in QAnon and had two secret QAnon children,” she says, amused but baffled by the lengths people will go to. She’s speaking over Zoom from the Caribbean where she’s brighter and smilier than I had expected from the frosty fashion photos that exist of her. “I mean, seriously, Americans are pretty weird,” she adds.
Still, it’s not as if anyone needs to invent stories about her. Part of the Guinness brewing dynasty, but also the Mitfords, a family of English aristocrats, Daphne grew up not realising her beloved granny, Diana Mosley, had been married to this country’s leading fascist, and once got into trouble at school after happily identifying him as a relative on TV. (She has since decried his politics entirely.) Her father, Jonathan Guinness, a British peer, had sets of children by three different women. One lot was a surprise to Daphne, though they’re all friends now, she says. When he was married to Daphne’s mother, Suzanne, Jonathan bought a former monastery up a dirt track on a Spanish mountain, near to the home of Salvador Dalí, who kept lobsters in his swimming pool. The Guinnesses spent several months a year there, with no electricity and no car. Daphne’s bed was beside the monastery’s altar. She spent a lot of time in caves, playing with hornets, or getting advice from Dalí, her mother’s great friend, on how to be naughty.
