How the dress celebrities love was born out of a mother’s grief
WITH their iridescent fabrics, billowing skirts and ruffled sleeves, Susie Cave’s dresses are — in her own words —‘light, bright and pretty’.
When actress Margot Robbie appeared in one of her designs at a wedding last weekend, she looked so dazzling that she almost outshone the bride. She wore a £1,595 shimmering red metallic gown in floaty chiffon from Susie’s label The Vampire’s Wife.
And she’s far from the only A-lister to fall for these ultra-feminine designs, with The Vampire’s Wife fast becoming a red carpet staple of celebrities including Sienna Miller, Keira Knightley Kate Moss and Dakota Johnson.
But while the label itself is the epitome of whimsical fashion, its founder — 51year-old Susie, a Nineties wild child and former ‘It’ girl now married to the singer Nick Cave — knows sadly little of the ‘lightness’ her clothes represent.
For the success of her brand has been born out of profound personal tragedy, which has engulfed Susie and her family for the past two-and-a-half years.
‘I struggle with certain things that have happened in my life and sometimes can be in quite a dark place,’ she said recently. ‘I get lost when I’m designing. Time just flies by. It’s actually an absolute gift, because the worst thing happened to me. I channel any positive energy I can into creating clothes.’
That worst thing happened on July 14, 2015, a date etched in Susie’s mind.
Shortly after 7pm that evening, she and Nick, to whom she has been married for 19 years, received a devastating phone call: their 15-year-old son, Arthur, had been found with fatal injuries at the bottom of Ovingdean Gap, a 60ft cliff near the family home in Brighton.
ARTHUR,an inquest later heard, had taken the hallucinogenic drug LSD with a friend for the first time that day. The pair became separated, leaving Arthur ‘completely disorientated’ and unable to tell what was real and what wasn’t. He sent messages to friends asking, ‘Where am I? Where am I?’
In the minutes before his death, motorists watched aghast as he staggered along the edge of the cliff, climbed over a safety fence and toppled into the abyss.
He was taken to a nearby hospital but doctors said he had suffered brain haemorrhages and catastrophic fractures to his skull.
Losing her son — a twin, whose brother, Earl, turns 18 this year — left Susie utterly bereft.
The family found themselves wading through a ‘treacle of grief’ (to use Nick’s eloquent expression), unable to comprehend the enormity of the loss.
‘He was a bright, shiny, funny, complex boy and we loved him deeply,’ they said at the time.
Susie had started The Vampire’s Wife 12 months previously, with friend Alex Adamson, and was busy building up a clientele. Understandably, it fell by the wayside in the aftermath of her son’s death. ‘The week after Arthur died, I was in bed,’ she explains. ‘I said: “Nick, I can’t do this. The Vampire’s Wife is over. Everything is over.” ’
Unable to work, leave the house or face seeing anyone, Susie retreated. Photographs from Arthur’s inquest show her hiding her face behind a curtain of raven- black hair, shoulders shuddering as she clung to Nick for support.
And then, three months later, came a phone call. ‘I got a call from Daisy Lowe — the model daughter of Pearl Lowe and a family friend — saying she needed a dress for an awards ceremony and would I make one for her?
‘So I dragged myself into the office to find the red fabric. And she wore it. And I saw it photographed. That was kind of a breakthrough. From then on I went to work every day.
‘Having something to do which was physically demanding enabled me temporarily not to think of anything else.’
Orders began flooding in from high-profile clients: model Alexa Chung; actress Elisabeth Moss; singer Florence Welch.
Styles — ranging from £970 velvet dresses to £1,595 glittery party frocks — started selling out. Little by little, Susie stitched herself back together.
‘When Arthur died, I didn’t think I could carry on,’ she said. ‘When you lose a child, nothing will take away the pain, not ever. But I did realise if I could focus on something outside of what had happened, that if I could separate myself somehow from it all, even for a few seconds, and start creating things in those moments of escapism, then that might be an important thing.’
It helps that Susie has always been passionate about designing. Born Susie Hardie- Bick, the daughter of an academic, she was brought up between Africa and Cheshire.
Her grandmother taught her how to use a sewing machine, a skill she put to good use at boarding school in the Seventies, when she used to transform her friends’ jeans from flares to drainpipes.
Age 14, she ran away from school and jetted off to New York, where she caught the eye of fashion photographer Steven Meisel.
By 16, she was modelling fulltime and, on her return to England the next year, became muse to celebrity photographer David Bailey.
She was introduced to Nick, the Australian- born frontman of rock band Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, by Bella Freud, a mutual friend, who ensured their paths crossed at a party at the Natural History Museum, in London.
‘He found me under the T-Rex,’ Susie recalled.
They married in a register office in Richmond, South-West London, followed by a blessing at a chapel in Surrey, in 1999.
As her husband’s career flourished, Susie found herself being invited to A-list parties — ‘I started designing clothes for myself because I couldn’t find anything I wanted to wear.’
The Vampire’s Wife — named after an unfinished novel of Nick’s — was the result, set up in 2014 in a small atelier in Brighton, with clothes manufactured in Poland.
‘Grief is all consuming,’ she said recently. ‘But you have to learn to live again, and try not to be a victim. Alongside my family, my work has saved me.’