Susie Cave Is Back in Fashion With a Deeply Personal New Label
4 min readStyle Points is a weekly column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.
When Susie Cave announced two years ago that she was shuttering her label The Vampire’s Wife, fans from all over the world were crushed. People still come up to her to tell her they got married wearing her designs. The outpouring “made everything feel like nothing was lost, nothing wasted,” she tells me now. “And that was, in a way, what gave me the courage to begin again.”
Cave’s latest act is the label Weddings & Funerals, which is operating on a much smaller scale than her previous brand. Rather than wholesale to major e-commerce sites and stores, she is doing things more quietly these days, taking a demi-couture approach and offering customized looks, with fittings taking place at her store on Kensington Church Walk in London. “We’re booked up until November with private appointments and we take our time,” she tells me proudly. “We don’t do more than two appointments a day.”
Susie Cave
Cave has always loved fashion and began designing for her friends while she was still in school. When she became a model in the ’90s after being discovered by Steven Meisel at age 14, she was known for wearing antique 1930s chiffon dresses “that were kind of falling apart,” she recalls. “I remember a couple of times both Azzedine [Alaïa] and John [Galliano] were like, ‘Give me that dress.’ And when I’d come in for a fitting, they’d run off with it, look at it, and then give it back to me later.”
When she started The Vampire’s Wife in 2014, she brought her love of vintage to the design process. She quickly became known for a shimmery, hyperfeminine, slightly retro aesthetic, one that’s still being debated today as we immerse ourselves in tradwife discourse and hand-wring over Olivia Rodrigo’s babydoll dress. “I wasn’t deliberately trying to be ironic or anything else. It was just all I knew how to do,” Cave says now. She points to punk icons like Courtney Love, who brought their own snarling attitude to classic totems of femininity. “It’s almost a rebellion when girls do it now, and I think it’s great. And I think it’s a shame that people are so judgmental…It is quite a punky thing to do these days, to go against the grain,” she says. “Vivienne [Westwood] was laughed at for many years. People didn’t take her seriously with her corsets and tiny miniskirts and platforms.”
A look from Weddings & Funerals.
Weddings & Funerals consists of 25 styles in black and white, some with gold accents. “You can modify them however you please,” Cave explains, clarifying that despite the line’s name, “it is also for weddings and also hopefully not too many funerals, but it’s more just occasion dressing. Though I am making quite a lot of wedding dresses at the moment.” She also made a Goth-meets-romantic ruffled black heart bag, emblazoned with the initials “T.S.,” that Tilda Swinton carried at the Cannes Film Festival. (That was a one-off commission, “because she is a personal friend of mine and loves the clothes.”)
Immersing herself in her creative work has been a way to channel her grief after her son Arthur’s death in 2015, something she and her husband, the musician Nick Cave, have spoken about in the hope of providing comfort to others who are mourning a loved one. “I think it is an amazing thing for grief to create in any way, because it’s like another kind of existence. You’re slightly removed from reality when you’re creating—it’s a little escape. And even for a few minutes, you can feel some kind of relief,” she says. “But what I realized with The Vampire’s Wife was that I was producing a huge amount and I think if I wasn’t grieving, I probably wouldn’t have been producing that much because I was just escaping the whole time, continually.”
“Cultish” is an overused term in fashion, but it definitely applies to The Vampire’s Wife. Worn by Kate Moss, Sienna Miller, and Kate Middleton, the brand quickly became a juggernaut. “Unfortunately, it grew so big and I lost control of the whole company. It just got bigger and bigger and then in the end it just crashed due to many different reasons,” she says. “Which is why with my new brand, I’m keeping it really small just so I can keep control of it. It’s much more personal, which is what The Vampire’s Wife was supposed to be, but it kind of got carried away.”
Like other prominent designers—Narciso Rodriguez among them—being able to do things on a smaller, more old-school scale has helped Cave reconnect with why she got into fashion in the first place. Just before our interview, “I was putting up all the cards of thanks on my dressing table from people I’ve made wedding dresses for,” she says. “I’ve got framed pictures and notes from people saying thank you and how they felt. And honestly, it makes me feel so emotional. It’s such a beautiful thing to think that I can help someone feel their best at their most important times,” she says. “Honestly, I could cry just talking about it.”