I LOVE NICE THINGS.

t doesn’t take long to see why Daphne Guinness has earned her reputation as the fashion person’s fashion person. On a December afternoon at the Carlyle hotel in Manhattan, she floats into the tearoom atop towering custom Christian Louboutin platform wedges and dressed in a gray wool sheath of her own design that clings to her delicate frame. A birdlike, ethereal creature, she wears a simple but splendid antique diamond brooch, her upturned blond mane adorned with her signature black skunk streak. Settling into a banquette, she sets down her capacious Hermès bag and summons a formerly invisible waiter, from whom she orders a pot of Lapsang souchong and a Red Bull. Informed the hotel doesn’t carry the high-octane beverage, she whispers for the concierge, who promptly dispatches a bellman to fetch it. Little in Guinness’s life has been ordinary. The daughter of Irish brewing heir Jonathan Guinness, Lord Moyne, and French beauty Suzanne Lisney—and granddaughter of Diana Mitford, the celebr...

The woman in question, everyone quickly learned, was Suzanne Saperstein, the Swedish-born chatelaine of Fleur de Lys, one of Los Angeles’s most extravagant homes. Although Saperstein, a former model and competitive skier, was no newcomer to Paris (she’s been a dedicated couture client since the Nineties), she had been mostly absent in recent seasons as she weathered a bitter divorce from her husband of 21 years, Texas billionaire David Saperstein. Among the jaded onlookers at the shows, Saperstein’s fashion-victim ensembles and 33-year-old boyfriend (former pro soccer player Christopher Roselli) sparked a range of comments, some kinder than others. But any critiques from the crowd were mild in comparison to the torpedoes Saperstein fires at herself a few weeks later, over lunch at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. As she amusingly mocks her physical imperfections, her taste in clothes and her tendency to get bloated during transatlantic flights, Saperstein confesses to a self-doubt tha...