Taking a year off after the closure of The Vampire’s Wife was vital to Cave the businesswoman and Cave the mother. “I was relieved it was all over,” she admits. A “clean break” was in order, from the family’s Regency house in Brighton, close to The Vampire’s Wife’s atelier, but also the scene of Arthur’s death, in favour of a new Kensington pad. It was the gear shift Cave needed to contemplate creating again. Gradually, dresses began appearing in her mind once more, and she enlisted an inner circle of six staffers from The Vampire’s Wife to help her realise her made-in-Britain vision. Rather than a soothing balm for her despair (“Work is what has saved me,” Susie told British Vogue in a 2017 profile), she began thinking about how her signature looks could make others feel.
For Bella Freud, the “fairy godmother” behind Cave’s own late ’90s wedding dress, her friend’s USP is simple: “Susie has this ability to make a dress that personifies romance. She creates allure and charm. Her dresses give the wearer the best proportions: a slender torso with high breasts and endless suggestion of leg. Weddings and funerals are occasions to be marked by intense feelings. Susie literally dresses those feelings.”
Cave, who will open the doors to her theatrical, Groves Natcheva-designed store in May, has always felt fashion offered her a sisterhood she never had. After learning her way around a sewing machine aged seven, thanks to her grandmother, Susie Hardie-Bick, as Cave was then known, spent her early teens redesigning her friends’ clothes while boarding at Devon’s Dartington Hall. When flares went out of style overnight, Susie was their saviour, transforming everyone’s trousers into “skin-tight, Olivia Newton-John” versions. “It was my way of making friends, because I grew up in a lot of different places,” says Cheshire-born Cave, who had a peripatetic upbringing due to her father’s work as a diplomat.
It was in New York that Cave’s life changed forever. After being expelled from Dartington (“I don’t know how I managed it, there were no rules”), Susie hitchhiked to London via milk float, then flew to Manhattan to see her father in his latest post. She happened to walk into Carnegie Hall where she was spotted by Bethann Hardison, the legendary model agent who opened her agency that very same day in 1984. “I was just this young school girl,” says Cave of being whisked off to do test shots with photographer Steven Meisel. He encouraged her to return to her studies, which she did, albeit briefly. When Susie returned to New York some years later, at first Meisel didn’t remember the raven-haired, porcelain-skinned waif before him. Of course the pair went on to work together, while the impressive roster of photographers who have immortalised her includes Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton and David Bailey.
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