The Tamesis
The year-long break since The Vampire’s Wife went off the air was crucial for businesswoman and mother Kev. “I’m relieved it’s over,” she admitted. A “clean break” with the family’s Regency House in Brighton, close to The Vampire’s Wife’s studio and the site of Arthur’s death, was necessary to facilitate the construction of new flats in Kensington. This is the gearing Cave needs to consider creating again. Gradually, the gown began to reappear in her mind and she recruited an inner circle of six staff members from The Vampire’s Wife to help her realize her vision of Made in Britain. Susie told the Brits that “work saved me” rather than console her despair. Fashion In a 2017 profile), she started thinking about how her signature look would make others feel.
Bella Freud, the “fairy godmother” behind Cave’s late ’90s wedding dresses, believes her friend’s unique selling point is simple: “Susie has the ability to create romantic gowns. She creates seduction and glamor. Her gowns offer the wearer the best proportions: long torsos, high busts and endless hints of leg. Weddings and funerals are occasions filled with strong emotions. Susie really puts those emotions on the clothes.”
Cave, who will open a dramatic store designed by Groves Natcheva in May, has always felt fashion provided her with a sisterhood she never had. Kev, then known as Susie Hardie-Bick, learned to use a sewing machine at the age of seven with the help of her grandmother. As a teenager, while a boarder at Dartington Hall in Devon, she redesigned her friends’ clothes. When bell-bottom pants went out of fashion overnight, Susie became their savior, turning everyone’s pants into the “tights, Olivia Newton-John” version. “That’s how I made friends because I grew up in a lot of different places,” said Cave, who was born in Cheshire. Since his father was a diplomat, Cave had been wandering around since he was a child.
It was in New York that Cave’s life changed forever. After being fired from Dartington (“I don’t know how I did it because there were no rules”), Susie catches a milk truck to London and then flies to Manhattan to meet her father in his latest post. She happened to walk into Carnegie Hall, where she was discovered by Bethann Hardison, the legendary modeling agent who opened her own agency that same day in 1984. “I was just a young schoolgirl,” Cave said of being whisked away to an audition with photographer Steven Meisel. He encouraged her to return to her studies, which she did, albeit briefly. A few years later, when Susie returned to New York, Messer initially didn’t remember the dark-haired, porcelain-skinned waif in front of her. Of course, the two continued to collaborate, and photographers who immortalized her include Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton and David Bailey.
