BIOGRAPHY:

The Honorable Daphne Suzanne Diana Joan Guinness was born in 1967, the daughter of brewery heir Jonathan Guinness, Lord Moyne, and French beauty Suzanne Lisney. Her paternal grandmother was Diana Mitford, one of the legendary Mitford sisters. Daphne is the youngest child in her family; she has an older brother, Sebastian, and three half-siblings (her father’s children with another woman). She grew up in stately homes in England and Ireland, and spent summers with her mother in an eighteenth-century former monastery in Cadaqués, Spain, where Salvador Dali was a `neighbor.

"That Daphne is a Guinness is important, because the Guinnesses are more than just a family. The are some vast international club. Whether they are enormously rich or penniless, old or young, famous or infamous, gay or straight, they have that special charisma quite unlike any other family. It has to do with their fundamental Irishness and all that involves: leprechauns, the gift of gab, not to mention the magic brew that the family still provides.'
~ personal friend and art historian John Richardson

In 1987, at the age of nineteen, Daphne married Spyros Niarchos, who was twelve years her senior and the second son of the fabulously wealthy Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos. A year later, she had the first of their three children. According to all accounts, they lived in a gilded yet constrained world, surrounded by bodyguards, traveling by yacht or private jet between homes in St. Moritz, New York, and the family’s island in Greece. After her divorce in 1999, Daphne resumed her maiden name, and over the past decade she has emerged on the world’s stage this extraordinary fashion creature.

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                     Daphne Guinness in 2002. Photography by
                     Dave M. Benett