Susie Cave Returns: The Strange, Beautiful Ritual of Weddings & Funerals.
When The Vampire’s Wife arrived, that sensibility found a name.
The dresses were romantic without being innocent, nostalgic without being quite nostalgic. They shimmered. They moved. They seemed designed for candlelight and questionable decisions.
The label grew rapidly.
Kate Moss wore it. Sienna Miller wore it. Catherine, Princess of Wales, wore one for an official portrait. The clothes acquired the inevitable word “cult”, a term fashion journalism applies whenever people become unusually devoted to something and everyone else starts wanting to know why.
But devotion was part of the story.
Women bought The Vampire’s Wife for weddings, parties, photographs and moments they wanted to hold onto. Cave has spoken about people approaching her years later to tell her they had married in one of her dresses.
When the company ultimately collapsed into administration in 2024, Cave described having lost control of something that had grown beyond its original scale. The commercial machinery had become too large for the intimate idea that had started it.
Weddings & Funerals is Cave’s answer to that experience.
Not a sequel to The Vampire’s Wife, but a contraction. A return to the room rather than the department store.
The customer comes in. The dress is discussed, fitted, altered. Something is added or removed. Cave is limiting the shop to two appointments a day.
It is almost defiantly slow.
The clothes themselves have been stripped back. Twenty-five silhouettes. Black and white. No florals. Instead, silk, silk velvet, organdy and brocade provide the drama through texture, movement and light.
The palette is hardly accidental.
The bride and the mourner have long occupied fashion’s opposite ends, yet the ceremonies themselves have much in common. Both gather people together. Both suspend ordinary life. Both demand ritual, photographs and a certain heightened awareness of the body.
And at both, someone eventually asks what everyone is wearing.
It sounds frivolous. It isn’t.
We dress for things we cannot quite articulate.
A wedding dress cannot make a marriage. A black dress cannot make grief. Clothes cannot alter what has happened. But they can give the body somewhere to put the feeling.
This is where Cave’s work inevitably brushes against the more difficult parts of her own life.
After the death of her son Arthur in 2015, Cave spoke about creating as a temporary removal from reality. Her stepson Jethro died in 2022. She has never suggested that clothes resolve grief; rather, making offered somewhere else to go for a while.
The new label does not feel like an attempt to turn sorrow into something beautiful. It feels more instinctive than that - an understanding that beauty and sorrow have never been particularly good at keeping their distance.
Florence Welch has described Cave’s clothes as making her feel powerful while remaining herself. Greta Bellamacina has likened them to a protective cloak.
That perhaps gets closer to the point.
Cave has always understood that clothing can alter the way a person occupies a room without requiring her to become someone else.
Now she is doing it on her own terms.
Twenty-five silhouettes. Made to order. Black or white. A handful of trusted people helping realise them. An appointment-only shop in Kensington rather than the machinery of global wholesale.
It is a smaller proposition, but not a diminished one.
Cave has spoken about keeping photographs and handwritten notes from women for whom she has made wedding dresses. Those fragments seem to explain more about the new enterprise than any declaration about fashion ever could. The dress leaves; the occasion passes; the photograph remains.
The garment becomes part of the story.
And perhaps that is enough.
Because the most interesting thing about Weddings & Funerals is not that Susie Cave has returned to fashion.
It is that, having seen what happens when something personal becomes too large, she has chosen to make something personal again.
A dress shop.
Twenty-five dresses.
A little theatre.
And, for once, no particular hurry.
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Words by AW.
Photo courtesy of Susie Cave / Weddings & Funerals.
