Susie Cave on the Art of Dressing for Funerals and Weddings

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

Susie Cave is not interested in playing it safe. The designer behind the beloved — and now closed — The Vampire's Wife has returned with a new venture called Weddings and Funerals, a demi-couture line of 25 dresses split evenly between black and white, housed in an appointment-only atelier on Kensington Church Walk in West London. The name alone tells you everything: Cave is here for the moments that actually matter.

The wedding side of the equation makes intuitive sense. According to Harper's Bazaar, The Vampire's Wife became an unexpected bridal institution — celebrities like Tilda Swinton, Sienna Miller, Dakota Johnson, and Princess Catherine of Wales wore it for significant occasions, and brides who wanted something darker, more romantic, and decidedly non-traditional kept writing to Cave about getting married in her pieces. Two brides have already worn the debut collection, and the appointment book is filling into October. Cave suspects it was never entirely accidental. "Perhaps, somehow, there was a subliminal message," she says — crediting 30 years of her own marriage, or maybe just the name of her old label, for the gravitational pull.

The Case for Funeral Glamour

The funeral angle is where Cave gets genuinely interesting. The concept crystallized when she saw a photograph of Karen Elson leaving a friend's funeral in black velvet TVW — "devastated, and just also so devastating," as Cave puts it. It sent her back to her own grandfather's funeral, where she wore a Philip Treacy hat and got side-eyed for it. She didn't see the problem then, and she doesn't now. Dressing up, to Cave, is an act of honor, not vanity. The black dresses in the collection — richly detailed, Gothic, velvet-heavy — are not exclusively for grief, but they can be. It's an underserved corner of occasionwear, and Cave is smart enough to see the gap without being crass about it.

The offering itself is a deliberate step back from scale. After The Vampire's Wife collapsed in 2024 — partly due to the fall of a major luxury e-tailer, partly because producing six collections a year and hundreds of units of the iconic Falconetti dress had outgrown her ability to maintain creative control — Cave rebuilt intentionally small. No wholesale. No online shop. Fabrics sourced largely in the UK, with lace from New York's Klauber Brothers and pearl embroidery by artisans in India. Cave fits every dress on her own body before anything reaches a client, a practice rooted in her decades of modeling — scouted at 15 by Bethann Hardison, shot by Nick Knight and Guy Bourdin, dressed by Dior and Versace. When she says she understands how fabric feels on a menopausal body in a hot climate, she means it literally. That specificity is the whole point.

Clients who book an appointment get more than a dress: Cave is opening her contact book, connecting them with trusted hair, makeup, and nail artists, and — given her marriage to Nick Cave — even musical resources for the occasion itself. Florence Welch has already praised the collection. The website will not crash here because there is no website. In a fashion moment defined by algorithmic speed and disposability, Weddings and Funerals is a quiet, deliberate act of resistance — and it's exactly as powerful as it sounds.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.