source : the age
“When I was at the Oscars with Nick, there were people coming up to me left, right and centre, just thanking me for the dresses,” says Susie Cave, pouring jasmine tea from one of the most ornate teapots I have ever seen, her immaculately lacquered gold nails glinting as they catch the light streaming through the window of her new shop.
It is two years since The Vampire’s Wife, Cave’s wildly popular dress label, closed, and women around the world – as her Oscars anecdote attests – were sent into fashion mourning. “We just grew too big too fast,” she says of the situation, reportedly caused by disruption in the wholesale market, including the collapse of the online retailer Matches Fashion and over-ambitious investors. To the joy of many – including, presumably, the loyal tribe of VIPs who loved The Vampire’s Wife, from the Princess of Wales to Sienna Miller and Cate Blanchett – she is making a comeback on her own terms with a new demi-couture label: Susie Cave, Weddings and Funerals.
“It’s made to make everyone look really beautiful. That was always my goal,” explains the designer, model, muse and wife of Australian singer Nick Cave (they were at the Academy Awards this year thanks to his Best Original Song Oscar nomination for the period drama Train Dreams). Hers is a polished sort of witchy power look, comprising, when we meet, a velvet blazer and pearl-embellished pencil skirt, which are old Vampire’s Wife samples, and a new pair of black-and-white Chanel heels, tracked down at Harrods after a tip-off from a friend who also happens to be Tilda Swinton’s stylist.
Cave is delicately ethereal but warm and sweet, too – just the kind of vibe that would be reassuring if you were a bride in search of something incredibly special or, conversely, shopping for an outfit to get you through the saddest of times, the two occasions this new label intends, initially, to cater for.
“So many people wanted to get married in The Vampire’s Wife,” she says. “After it closed, it was endless, a lot of people writing to me about that. Then I had seen Karen Elson wear my black velvet Night Sparrow dress to a funeral. I saw a photo of her coming out of the church crying, but looking so elegant and beautiful, and then I thought the two things could go together, this ceremonial dressing.”
Cave has her own reasons for finding solace in dressing women for the most tragic, as well as the happiest, days of their lives. She, too, has endured them. In 2015, one of her twin sons, Arthur, died aged 15. He fell from a cliff; an inquest later concluded this was a result of trying LSD for the first time. Then, in 2022, Jethro, Nick’s son with model Beau Lazenby, died aged 31. If Cave once spoke about her work “saving” her in the wake of Arthur’s death, then the past two years have been about opening a new chapter for Nick, their son Earl, now 25, who is an actor, and herself, as she nears her 60th birthday. She has busied herself with projects that intertwine the personal and professional. “I like doing a lot of things at once; it comes from being a mother of twins,” says Cave. “You learn to be doing an awful lot of stuff at the same time. Before I had children, I wasn’t really like that. And also because I married Nick, he does so many things all at once, he’s always working.”
One of her endeavours is a forthcoming book, Susie, a collaboration with the photographer Dominique Issermann. “I suppose the book is about motherhood and also grief for me, but it’s just beautiful photos,” Cave says. Issermann has been witness to the most intimate highs and lows of her friend’s life. “She documented modelling right the way through to me marrying Nick and having Earl and Arthur. Then, after Arthur had died, she came to live with us for two weeks. She’s amazing.” What began as tender portraits taken to capture a moment will become Cave’s way of telling her most painful stories.
The Caves have moved from Brighton, where they raised their sons, back to London. She has overseen the creation of their new Kensington home, and is giving The Vampire’s Wife archives to the V&A, including costumes worn by Florence Welch, among many others. She has kept “a modest amount, about six rails” for herself. In the past year, she has spent “more time with Nick and my son, having a clean break”. And then she started again: “I couldn’t leave it for very long.”
How does she feel about turning 60, for which party plans are already underway? “I can’t believe I’ve got to 60. It’s really strange because I thought I’d be geriatric with a walking stick at 60, but these days we just do a lot more and we have our children later and we just keep going.” Indeed, when she acquired the shop that has become Weddings and Funerals HQ, she briefly considered turning it into a private Pilates studio. However, friends from The Vampire’s Wife days urged her to explore the Weddings and Funerals idea.
“I’ve been taking a lot of time, it’s not such a rush. Each dress has couture finishes and I’ve just been working on 25 dresses and doing them in a really different way,” she says, leafing through a rail hung high to accommodate the cascading proportions of her designs.
“I love this dress, it’s a kind of Wuthering Heights dress because it’s got these incredible sleeves and you just feel so elegant wearing it,” she notes of one delicate lace gown. “And this one is a one-size-fits-all because it’s got a belt at the back.” She explains, too, how the bust is the starting point for each dress: “Everything’s completely architectural, starting where the nipple points should be on a perfect breast. I do it so that it makes you look like you’ve got the most perfect breasts.” It’s the kind of detail that has always set her apart from other designers who prefer to ignore, rather than enhance and flatter, the anatomical realities of women’s bodies.
Although Weddings and Funerals only opened for business at the start of June, Cave has been working with some special clients for months, from VIPs to Samantha, her old design assistant, who married in May wearing a gown created from layers of British lace and organza, worn beneath a lace pussy-bow cape with a sweeping train.
This is a cottage enterprise, just a team of six, and Cave is sourcing fabrics from beloved British suppliers of silks and laces, such as Bennett, Pongees and Whaleys. The whole set-up is intimate and every detail is meaningful, from the location, close to the former Biba store, which is a longtime inspiration for Cave, to the African wood-veneer interior, chosen to reflect Malawi, where she grew up as the daughter of a diplomat. Brides can create a “total look”, working with Cave’s favourite hair, make-up and nail artists, too. Her references are wide-ranging, from Hollywood costumes of the 1930s to Queen Elizabeth II (“I’m obsessed with the way she carried her handbag”).
The process of choosing a dress with a tailor and seamstress on hand to ensure a personalised finish came from the many times she has been dressed by her friend Alessandro Michele, formerly of Gucci and now creative director at Valentino. “I’ll have a few things in all sizes, especially for something like a funeral where there’s no time to wait,” she says. “I just want clients to feel a little bit heard, that we can really make something that they feel good in.”
Her dresses for her 1999 wedding to Nick have also been an inspiration. Susie Bick, one of the biggest British models of the 1990s, met Nick Cave through her friend Bella Freud. For one of the wedding ceremonies, Freud dressed her in “a beautiful knitted silk rayon dress with a really long train that had a little tie that went around my finger, and it was so beautiful, and then Philip Treacy made this incredible headpiece with masses of white feathers”.
It all sounds impossibly romantic, involving a church in a forest with a path of rose petals. But there were practical matters, too, such as the last-minute realisation that her dress was see-through. “Someone had to go on a motorbike to London to find me a tiny thing to wear underneath so it kind of held up the wedding a little bit.” She has incorporated lingerie options into Weddings and Funerals for this very reason.
While Susie would never get involved in Nick’s music (“I’m not needed in that department”), there’s evidently a profound creative partnership between them. She advises him on visuals and photographers, while he has always been interested in her design work – or, perhaps, simply in what she wears. “He’s not the type of man who doesn’t notice, he notices every detail. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to generalise about men. He’s incredibly supportive.”
Cave stepped back from modelling when she had children in 2000, but earlier this year she starred in a campaign for Haider Ackermann’s Tom Ford collection. “I’m definitely not modelling again,” she insists, “but he’s a friend, it was just a special thing.” Besides, “it’s strange how it all came back to me, because I started modelling when I was, like, 14 or 15 [when she was discovered by the photographer Steven Meisel]. Haider’s clothes are so beautiful so you don’t really have to do anything. You just sort of stand up.”
But then a moment of doing very little might be welcome, given her work ethic. “I really don’t go on holiday, I’ve travelled so much in my life for work that I just love being in one place and I just work; I love working,” she admits. “I’m not one of those people who have a work/life balance. I’m just designing the whole time and driving everyone crazy because I’m not doing fun things. I basically see my family and my friends and have little dinners here and there.” And with that, she takes a last sip of tea and moves off in her Chanel heels to rifle through her otherworldly designs.
This is an edited extract of a story first published in The Telegraph (UK)
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