Meet Susie Cave: From 80s Model To Cult Fashion Designer To Muse

For nearly three decades, Susie Cave has occupied one of fashion’s most compelling paradoxes: she is simultaneously one of the industry’s most defining figures and its most enigmatic. Discovered by Steven Meisel on a flight to New York at just 14 years old, she became an icon of 1980s and 90s high fashion – a muse to Vivienne Westwood, a cover girl for The Damned, a phantom presence in the work of photographers like Helmut Newton and David Bailey. Yet her greatest achievement came not on the runway but in the studio, where she co-founded The Vampire’s Wife, a cult fashion label that offered its devoted followers an alternative vision of feminine power and authentic style.

Now a new book celebrating her life and work arrives this September, tracing Susie’s journey from bohemian boarding school runaway to design visionary. SUSIE, created with renowned photographer Dominique Issermann and featuring reflections and lyrics by her husband Nick Cave, opens a window onto a life defined by transformation, loss and an unwavering commitment to beauty as an act of resistance. And to hear Susie reflect on the book with fellow designer Bella Freud, don’t miss their event at Chelsea Arts Festival 2026.

The Muse Years

Susie Bick was born in Cheshire in 1966, but thanks to her diplomat father, she spent much of her childhood abroad, moving between Malawi and Nigeria. At 14, she ran away from boarding school. Within months, she was discovered by photographer Steven Meisel on a flight to New York, which launched her into the world of high fashion modeling.

Even then, Susie had an immediately striking look: porcelain skin, jet-black hair, a melancholic gaze. Part punk, part aristocratic, photographers and designers were drawn to her throughout the 1980s and 90s (including Nick Knight, who photographed the now-iconic image ‘Susie Smoking’). She appeared on the covers of major fashion magazines – French Glamour, Harper’s & Queen, Elle UK – and modeled for some of fashion’s most prestigious houses: Yohji Yamamoto, Christian Dior, Versace, Yves Saint Laurent. In 1985, she appeared on he cover of The Damned’s album Phantasmagoria, a gothic-punk crossover that became another emblematic image.

But it was her partnership with Vivienne Westwood that became deeply significant. Working together across a decade, Susie was there for the Autumn/Winter 1989 show, the Voyage to Cythera collection, wearing Westwood’s radical corseted silhouettes and Victorian-inspired tailoring.

But in 1997, when Susie met Nick Cave, she stepped away from the runway and, it seemed, from the spotlight entirely. Before she re-emerged in 2014, she would marry Nick, give birth to two sons – twins Arthur and Earl – and raise them in Brighton.

A 2023 The Vampire’s Wife campaign image.

The Designer

When Susie launched The Vampire’s Wife in 2014 with designer Alex Adamson, she arrived with a philosophy forged in the fashion trenches but fundamentally opposed to everything she’d witnessed as a model. Where the industry celebrated deconstruction, irony and trend-chasing, Susie would champion authenticity and move at her own deliberate pace.

Her design philosophy was, in many ways, a rejection of the world she’d inhabited two decades prior. The Vampire’s Wife celebrated all things textiles – 100 percent silk, silk-velvet, organdy, brocade – and self-governed femininity, dressing women who wanted to feel powerful, comfortable and entirely themselves. The Falconetti dress, deemed by Vogue the ‘dress of the decade’, embodied this: a gothic-romantic hybrid that fused vintage silhouettes and Old Hollywood glamour with subtle, shadowy edges.

Rejecting fashion’s wholesale model, Susie’s pieces were small in number and limited in distribution. This attracted a cult following, including names like Kate Moss, Florence Welch, the Princess of Wales and Keira Knightley.

Art Through Grief

In July 2015, Susie and Nick’s 15-year-old son Arthur fell from a cliff near Brighton. The loss was devastating. In the years that followed, The Vampire’s Wife became a vehicle for processing unbearable grief. As Nick Cave would later write on his Q&A blog The Red Hand Files in 2024, ‘The Vampire’s Wife was not just a clothing company, it was a pure and necessary articulation of the grief that Susie felt in the wake of the death of our son, Arthur. The Vampire’s Wife was Susie’s Ghosteen [his 2019 album]. Just as I tried through music to create a place for Arthur to be, real or imagined, Susie’s dresses were an attempt to give her grief form by throwing fabric over an invisible boy, as an act of love, an act of mercy, and an act of contrition. That is the truth of it – as softly spoken and dream-like as the dresses themselves – the clothes Susie created were objects of devotion, sacred things that will live on regardless of the brand’s fortunes.’

Nick was writing in response to fans who had sent him and Susie love upon hearing The Vampire Wife was closing its doors after a decade of work. He also wrote: ‘For Susie, the label’s end amounts to a kind of grief, but she is an extraordinarily resilient woman, sometimes shockingly so. She feels many things at the moment – sad, happy, angry, nostalgic, regretful and proud, but most importantly, she feels suddenly free.

‘It is easy to see the situation as a tragedy,’ Nick continued, ‘and of course it is sad for everyone who worked so hard to keep the brand afloat, but really, it is a miracle that The Vampire’s Wife ever existed at all. As I have often pointed out in The Red Files, wonders such as these are eternal reminders of the terrifying counter-intuitive truth that grief is not the end of things but rather the dark substrate from which great things can emerge. From a small distance, over the ten years the company existed, I have watched in awe at the defiant, grief-soaked, joyful ambition of it all. Today, I feel nothing but pride.’

Susie, photographed by Dominique Issermann.

The Book

SUSIE, arriving on 16 September, is Dominique Issermann’s photographic love letter to the woman she has documented for decades, paired with Nick Cave’s lyrical reflections spanning from their first meeting in 1997 to now. It is a testimony to motherhood, loss, transformation and the strength of a creative partnership built on devotion.

‘This is a book about love, in all its shades,’ Susie and Nick shared on the book’s announcement. ‘We are so grateful to our beloved friend, the brilliant photographer Dominique Issermann, who quietly documented our relationship from its earliest days and has made it possible for us to tell this intimate story of family, loss and transformation.

‘We are also thankful to iconic designer Irma Boom and Thames & Hudson for creating this deeply personal book with such care and respect,’ they added.

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