Daphne Guinness, a British socialite and heir to the Guinness brewing dynasty, has reflected on the changing nature of the British aristocracy, describing the traditional mystique once associated with the ruling class as having vanished. Speaking recently, Guinness, 58, noted that the reverence historically afforded to wealth and status has shifted toward a more overt preoccupation with money.

Guinness, who has built a diverse career as a fashion designer, model, and musician, said the landscape she returned to after leaving England in the 1980s felt markedly different from the one she once knew. “Just this, I don’t know, this worship of money,” she remarked. “In the old days, no one talked about money. It was kind of nice.” While she acknowledged that some members of the old aristocracy could be “overly snobby,” she suggested there had been an intangible allure in the discretion and mystique surrounding their wealth.

The Guinness family has long been embedded in the British and Anglo-Irish upper class, though its history is not without controversy. Daphne Guinness is the daughter of Jonathan Guinness and the granddaughter of Bryan Guinness. Bryan’s wife, Diana Mitford, gained notoriety in the 1930s for divorcing him to marry Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. Diana Mitford attended the Nazi Party’s first Nuremberg Rally, while her sister, Unity Mitford, was closely associated with Adolf Hitler and later attempted suicide after Britain entered World War II.

When asked about this fraught lineage, Guinness expressed a mixture of dismay and resignation, characterizing the family’s legacy as complex and difficult. The Netflix drama *House of Guinness*, released last year, brought renewed attention to the family’s past, which Guinness described as “an accident waiting to happen for a family like ours.” She noted that public fascination with these stories is intense but difficult to fully grasp during childhood.

Daphne Guinness’ own upbringing was cosmopolitan; she spent her early years in a Spanish villa where Salvador Dalí was a family friend. She later moved to the United States where she lived with her half-sister Catherine, who worked as an assistant to artist Andy Warhol in New York City. In 1987, she married Spyros Niarchos, a scion of the Greek shipping billionaire Stavros Niarchos. The couple divorced in 1999, with Guinness receiving a settlement reportedly worth approximately $39 million.