Susie Cave returns with intimate occasionwear label after The Vampire’s Wife closes

Susie Cave is betting that the future of occasionwear is smaller, sharper and harder to get. After The Vampire’s Wife shut down in 2024, she returned with a namesake label built around just 25 silhouettes, custom-tailored and personalised for each client, with appointments booked online from a by-appointment-only storefront on Kensington Church Walk in West London due to open in mid-to-late May 2026.

That is a very different business from the one Cave ran for a decade as creative director of The Vampire’s Wife. Founded in 2014 or 2015 with Alex Adamson, the label became one of those rare cult names that escaped the fashion bubble and entered the social circuit. Its Gothic, feminine dresses showed up at Liberty, Browns, Dover Street Market and Matchesfashion, and they worked their way from fashion people’s wardrobes into the closets of Kate Moss, Keira Knightley, Florence Welch, Kirsten Dunst, Alexa Chung, Rachel Weisz and Sienna Miller. The Princess of Wales wore it too, which is the kind of visibility money can’t quite buy.

Then the market turned brutal. The Vampire’s Wife ceased trading in May 2024 after HM Revenue & Customs filed a winding-up petition over unpaid tax in 2023, and after the post-pandemic wholesale squeeze that has flattened more than a few small labels. Farfetch’s distress sale to Coupang and the collapse of Matchesfashion made the middle layer of luxury retail feel much less stable, especially for independent designers who depended on stockists to move volume. Even the 2019 majority stake taken by Jimmy Iovine and Liberty Ross could not rescue the model once wholesale started breaking apart.

Cave’s reset looks like a designer taking the lesson seriously. Instead of chasing scale, she is stripping the business down to intimacy: fewer looks, direct appointments, controlled fittings, and a storefront that sounds more like a private salon than a shop floor. That is exactly why it may work. In a market flooded with logo fatigue and overexposed product drops, exclusivity now means access, attention and time, not just rarity.

The new collection keeps the dark romance that made The Vampire’s Wife memorable, but the silhouette count tells the real story. Twenty-five pieces is not a sprawling relaunch; it is a calibrated statement. Cave is not trying to rebuild the old machine. She is trying to turn cult recognition into a more disciplined, higher-touch business.

That feels smart for a designer with a loyal visual signature and a customer base that already understands the fantasy. Cave, who started modeling at 14 and retired in 1997, has always carried that mix of glamour and distance that fashion still finds magnetic. In the 2026 Pirelli Calendar, she said she lives by the sea in England and that swimming underwater clears her mind. The new label has the same energy: isolated, controlled, and built for people who want their occasionwear to feel privately owned.