lithe spirit; With her uniquely whimsical sense of style, the oh-so-slim taste- and moviemaker Daphne Guinness is a fashion designer's dream.

Byline: Hamish Bowles

Daphne Guinness has laid waste to her fitting room at Christian Lacroix's Parisian haute couture salon, as befits a woman whose latest style icon is Lord Nelson. "I have such a uniform fetish-isn't it terrible?" laughs Guinness, 36. "I love the idea of having a sword and a uniform and medals and ribbons and clambering onto a horse. And that hat! And maybe a patch over one eye!"

The delightfully madcap Guinness

hasn't dressed here since Lacroix's debut in 1987, when, as the nineteen-year-old bride of Spyros Niarchos, scion of the Greek shipping billionaire Stavros, she added one of the designer's signature pouf dresses (a piebald-pony bustier above a bubble of caramel satin) to her trousseau. This afternoon she appears to be making up for lost time. Her second-skin Chanel black pants and short-sleeved Prada black cashmere sweater (that looks-like so many of her things-as though it might have been bought in the children's department) lie inside-out on the floor; the chased-silver platforms that her dear friend Christian Louboutin designed specially for her (and that add six and three-quarter inches to her dainty five feet five) are tumbled nearby; a Lanvin star-burst brooch (Guinness delights in mixing very good jewels with imaginative costume pieces) has lost a stone in a fall to the ground, and she has whipped off her Valentino custard taffeta shirt with such alacrity that one of its covered buttons has popped off and is bobbing along the floor among the fabric swatch cards. These she is consulting with a view to exercising her own interventions on the designer's masterworks, something she has been doing since her haute couture debut, when she worked with Marc Bohan at Dior to concoct her dream wedding gown-a Tissot confection of bustled Brittany lace. "She makes me her own," says Alexander McQueen simply, and she has worn that designer's wildest Givenchy couture fantasias as well as his most rigorous tailored pieces with equal aplomb. "I like the really show-offy pieces; I always do!" says Guinness. "The first time I saw her," says Amanda Harlech, "I didn't…