Susie Cave: ‘My imagination can get a little bit scary’

Susie Cave’s Brighton kitchen is painted a very particular bruised-peach pink and the mirrored color on her pores and skin makes it look as if she’s carved from cleaning soap. Until she married musician Nick Cave, she was Susie Bick, the 90s mannequin found by photographer Steven Meisel on a flight to New York at 14 years previous. David Bailey took her below his wing and her very white pores and skin and really black hair helped form a profession that noticed her on the duvet of two Roxy Music data, shot for advert campaigns, together with Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior, and bare on the catwalk in Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter. Hers was a kind of fabled tales – she was a woman who felt misplaced, so hitchhiked away from her Devonshire boarding faculty on a milk float to seek out glamour and fame. “I spent most of my life running away on milk floats,” she smiles at the moment. As a teenager, “I was, umm, wilful. At 15 I caught a plane to Japan with 20p in my pocket. Made loads of money. Came back all grown up!” The individuals she met alongside the way in which, as if tin males and lions, helped form the girl she grew to become, after which, in 2014, the model she launched. Now, at 54, there’s solely a fantastic line between the 2; a hid zip.

Susie’s pal Bella Freud launched her to Nick within the shadow of a dinosaur skeleton on the V&A Museum after hours. The first time he noticed her (Cave says, within the 2014 movie 20,000 Days on Earth), he noticed, “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’s arms and Jackie O in mourning.” Viewed from right here, their entwined careers learn like love letters to one another, however ones so passionate they’ve damaged their banks and spilled out into the world. They married in 1999. On their honeymoon she grew to become pregnant with twins, and in 2014, when Earl and Arthur had been youngsters, she launched the Vampire’s Wife, named after considered one of Cave’s unfinished novels. Today, Nick is liable for naming the clothes, selecting materials and infrequently modelling alongside them.

The first piece I noticed, quickly after the model launched, was a jewelled appeal bracelet, every appeal based mostly on considered one of Cave’s songs, and I keep in mind considering it should be the most costly piece of fan artwork ever made. One of the charms was Nick’s purple proper hand, one other was a tiny gold church – should you opened the door you could possibly see the 2 of them getting married. It nonetheless strikes me as obsessive and intimate, a model of somebody doodling their future husband’s title on their homework diary. Of course, I cherished it on sight. Theirs was a household shaped out of poems and rubies.

In the summer season of 2015, Arthur Cave died after falling from a cliff close to their residence in Brighton. What’s the worst that can occur? This. The worst factor that can occur, occurred to the Cave household. For a whereas they had been quiet, shifting slowly via that syrupy grief. Then, one way or the other, they emerged with a new language to debate it; in Nick’s Red Hand Files he responded to a grieving fan with the realisation there’s a approach, “not out of grief, but deep within it”. “Susie’s grief,” Nick wrote, “has become part of her chemistry, it 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.” Three months after their son’s demise, the mannequin Daisy Lowe known as, asking for a purple occasion gown. Susie dragged herself off the bed to seek out the material and with it (a fantastic scarlet velvet she lined with silk) discovered a new type of vitality. “A lifeline.” She went to work and, since then, has not often stopped.

“The world has been a different place for me for five years,” she says, slowly, her hair a shiny defend; she is well-known for her shyness, a trait that solely provides to her sticky mystique. “So everything has felt surreal and strange and not normal for a while. Even before Covid, I kind of lived like this already, in a sort of alternate universe, together with other grieving people. To create my clothes brings me extraordinary joy. To be engaged in the creative process keeps me alive. It is a survival strategy. It helps me enormously. So I feel very fortunate that people seem to like what I do. I’m happy to make beautiful things that people enjoy wearing.” Is she blushing? On Zoom, the sign stutters.

“I’ve known Susie since I was 16,” Kate Moss tells me over e-mail. “She was always my favourite model and the most glamorous woman I had ever met. Now she makes clothes that are otherworldly, timeless and so flattering to wear.” Kate remembers being backstage at considered one of Nick’s concert events at Victoria Park in London, “and all the girls were wearing Susie dresses – we became the Vampire’s Wife cult, it was major.” “Susie dresses”, sometimes, are body-skimming and jewel-bright, in velvet corduroy, lace, or slippery silk, with a hem that falls slightly below the knee. The shoulders are tweaked into a snippy little level. The lightness of material implies that once you step into one you are feeling a nice shiver, like a cat being stroked.

At Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s 2018 marriage ceremony, three friends wore Vampire’s Wife clothes. They match each pop stars and royals: the Falconetti – high-necked, ruffled, usually seen in shimmering shades of dying mermaid – was worn by Kate Middleton and Princess Beatrice. Before Susie actually knew what was occurring, she had created what Vogue known as, “the dress of the decade”.

When I contacted a few of the Vampire’s Wife’s followers, the ladies whose purple carpet portraits and trend journal covers have made the clothes well-known, all of them replied not simply with particulars of how they love the garments, however how they love the garments as a result of the garments are infused with an essence of Susie herself. “Her creations are just as beautiful and special as she is,” messaged Keira Knightley. “Wearing her dresses is an occasion in itself, full of magic and decadence.” Maya Rudolph agrees. “Her dresses make me feel like a woman. And a witchy one 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 Wife each on and off stage, informed me she feels a kinship with Susie. “I think we both inhabit a dream world, but have found a way to pull those dreams into reality. I recognise in her the strength that takes. To commit wholly to your aesthetic vision regardless of what people consider ‘fashionable’ or ephemeral trends. There’s a subversive femininity to her creations that really speaks to me.” The garments, she says, make her really feel darkly romantic. “I think the most beautiful things have a strangeness to them and her dresses seem to have walked out of a gothic fantasy. One that is entirely Susie’s.”

During the pandemic the Vampire’s Wife has been producing face masks, too, lots of which current extra as objects of kinky seduction than Covid safety, and supplying them to the Royal Sussex County Hospital and native hospices. Now, each gown has a matching face masks; they really feel oddly right, silky bits of trend relatively than medical equipment. As with all Susie’s designs, “The end in mind is always beauty. I want the person wearing the dress to be their most beautiful, their most comfortable, to almost be transported, to feel sort of… encased in beauty. To escape.” She is keen on organza, for instance, as a result of it, “literally looks like you’re floating”. She makes use of florals, however ones which can be a little bit off, with the sense they’d thrive graveside.

Invited to collaborate on a assortment for H&M in 2020, she says: “I had the same things in mind, so everyone could feel graceful and fairytale-like.” It offered out in 24 hours. “Yes, it’s growing into a sort of… not a cult, but…” She has an alert on her cellphone for when somebody makes use of a Vampire’s Wife hashtag, and it offers her a thrill every time. “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 should put together then, for her cellphone to begin buzzing.

After complimenting a Vampire’s Wife gown worn by his spouse, the mannequin Liberty Ross, Jimmy Iovine (the billionaire entrepreneur behind Beats headphones) purchased a majority stake within the model. They’re on observe, reviews Business of Fashion, to extend income by 30% 12 months on 12 months. “Susie,” stated Iovine, “is as much of an artist as the great women I’ve worked with, including Stevie Nicks and Patti Smith.” Is it doable to maintain the artwork – the light darkness of the clothes, their other-worldly gothic restraint – if Susie releases the reins to American traders, permitting it to develop past what she calls, “A family business, truly”?

“I wouldn’t want it to be so big that it would lose its essence,” she says, slowly. “I’m very, very protective of the brand, I’ve been asked to do a lot of things that I’ve said no to, because I just really want to keep it very true to what it is.” Which is? “I’m motivated by beauty. And everything I make has to be something I would wear. Admittedly, it can be difficult – every day is a battle to keep it as it is.” Instead of following the standard seasons and catwalk reveals, Susie was impressed by the skatewear manufacturers her sons wore, and drips designs on-line month-to-month, in restricted portions. The trend world at the moment, she says, is “unrecognisable” from the one she entered as a teenager. “When I was modelling all those years ago, the industry was very small. We were a community. There is a lot of bad talk about the industry these days, but I never had anything but good experiences, working with mind-blowingly talented and very supportive people. I was lost, and the fashion industry took me in and gave me a home.”

The plan with Iovine is to supply extra reasonably priced items (a typical Vampire’s Wife gown prices greater than £1,000), in addition to model extensions together with knit loungewear, purses and residential items. It’s not unimaginable that the bruised pink of her kitchen wall will sooner or later reappear in your mattress garments, or tub towel. And because the Vampire’s Wife grows, so does Nick Cave’s new enterprise, Cave Things, a web based store of such objects as sticker sheets, wrapping paper and a jumper for canine that claims “Suck My Dick”.

“My imagination is based in folk art, fairy tales, mystical things. And, you know,” she smiles, “it gets a little bit scary in there. There’s beauty, but infused with a sort of darkness.” Where does she assume that comes from? “This is something I have dealt with all of my life, a sense of impending catastrophe, a dark force on the boundary of my vision. I try to use this darkness to create beautiful and soulful things. And I’m always very curious about… unusual things. Covid has allowed me to really indulge that side of myself. Because, well, there’s nothing else to do.”

The blog page of the Vampire’s Wife web site showcases her many curiosities, latest posts having included Renoir’s nudes, a clip of a Maya Angelou poem, the ultimate paragraph of a James Joyce story and a beneficiant scattering of Nick Cave ephemera, a digital moodboard of muses. She, after all, has usually been described as a muse herself, having impressed photographers (Helmut Newton), designers (Azzedine Alaïa) and musicians (every time Prince was in London, he’d ship her roses) all her life, however the idea nonetheless rankles. “To be honest, I find the word muse to be a little demeaning. I haven’t really got time to be anyone’s muse. However, I am a frequent visitor in my husband’s songs, I seem to be always walking in and out of them. His songs look after me. And if I am to be a muse, then I am his and he is mine.”

Through lockdown, Susie took down every of the tons of of photographs she had pinned to her workplace partitions one after the other. She painted the room white and considered the place to begin once more. Today there are solely two items of paper left. The first is a picture of Isabel Adjani in One Deadly Summer, darkish haired, white necked, acquainted. The second is a lyric from one of many 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, one dress at a time.”

The Vampire’s Wife Collection 12 is obtainable