I first came across one evening during a foggy London winter. It was a picture of a girl in a deep orange-pink velvet dress that captivated me. I searched for the designer and discovered the name.
The story began to unfold. The dresses seemed to come out of the sky. .
Tantalising comets of timeless beauty. Everything I had been searching for in a dress had come true. These were more than just bits of fabric, they held the illogical power of poetry in them.
For some unknown reason, every time I would wear one, it felt like it was made just for me. Susie’s dresses bring something from another time. You arrive at a perfectly ordinary party feeling like you are carrying a Victorian stage production of into the room with you.
You can step out of a taxi feeling like you are stepping out of a painting by Rossetti. This ability to transcend time in fashion is quite radical, as is Susie’s determination to make a world of her own and not follow trends. Before I met Susie, I started wearing her dresses for my poetry performances.
I liked the shape and structure of the dresses on stage with their gothic shadows inside them. It gave me the visual reference to my own words. In the silent moments, the dress did the talking.
A gentle reminder of a more magical and stranger world. A defence and escape against it all. I met Susie one night at a Nick Cave concert.
There she was: gentle, mystical, an indefinable beauty. A living embodiment of the dresses themselves. I was nervous to meet her.
