Heiress and socialite Daphne Guinness has gone from front row of haute-couture fashion shows to in front of the camera for Akris.

SWISS fashion label Akris unveiled its first handbag collection and has chosen über fashionista Daphne Guinness as the face of the range.

Looking very unlike her usual blonde self – Guinness is usually seen with her trademark skunk-striped hair – Daphne looks simply flawless.

“For one, Daphne is a beautiful and intriguing woman - a fashion icon in her own right,” Akris designer Albert Kriemler, grandson of the company’s founder, explained. “I have seen her photographed by Steven before, she emanates a sense of mystery and aristocracy – there is more to the picture than meets the eye.”

The new Akris bags – the trapezoidal-shaped Ai bag and the Amata clutch – pictured with Guinness, who is sporting the new spring/summer 2010 collection, will arrive in stores in February.

Daphne Guinness is prominent in the fashion world as a style icon, journalist and noted collector of Haute couture.

The daughter of Irish brewing heir Jonathan Guinness, Lord Moyne, and French beauty Suzanne Lisney, she grew up in stately homes in Ireland and England and spent summers in an 18th-century former monastery in Cadaqués, on the Spanish coast near Barcelona, where the neighbors included surrealists Salvador Dalí and Man Ray.

At 19, in 1987, she married Spyros Niarchos, 12 years her senior and a son of the fabulously wealthy Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos. She started to put clothes together in her own eclectic way when she was with Niarchos, and amassed a vast collection of designer pieces. Once they had separated, she started going to fashion shows and parties and was finally in a world where she could express herself in clothes, and her outfits were celebrated.

It was her rarefied sense of style that ultimately helped Guinness bounce back after the divorce. Guinness explains today that she’s always preferred to “inhabit clothes rather than wear them.”

Daphne Guinness wearing Nina Ricci shoes

Nothing about Daphne Guinness is plain. She is a rather exotic creature, existing in the kind of fashionable bohemian world where everyone is creating something all the time. It’s not just her look – even though her blonde and black skunk-like hair is her trademark. ‘I never meant it to be like this,’ she says, tugging on it. ‘I just glue bits on to it and this is how it turns out.’ She knows endless photographers, including David LaChapelle and Steven Klein, and finds designers ‘fascinating’. Because of her glamorous connections and contacts, she is at every launch, every fashion show, and every party almost worldwide.

During Paris Fashion Week, Alexander McQueen sent models down the runway wearing 12-inch Armadillo heels. Evoking fear to all those who looked at them, Daphne Guinness was the first celebrity savvy enough to secure them – and then brave enough to actually wear them in public. In fact, Guinness scored the debut for the McQueen shoes that have divided fashion lovers everywhere and paired her nude leather armadillo heels with a dress from the same Alexander McQueen spring / summer 2010 collection.

Contrary to popular perception, she is not a muse to anyone. She said that she’d be perfectly happy to be a muse to a designer, as Amanda Harlech is to Karl Lagerfeld, say, but that no one has ever asked her. She does, however, have many designers who admire her – Valentino said of her, ‘Daphne amazes me all the time. When I think she has reached the best, she comes up with something better.’

Last year she cleaned out her closet and auctioned 1,000 designer items bought during her marriage. She raised $158,000 for Womankind, a charity that deals with the political and domestic abuse of women worldwide. ‘I wanted to sell those dresses,’ she says. ‘They represented a part of my life that I’m not proud of. I don’t want to go into it more than that. I just thought that if I could use them to make other people happy it might readdress the nightmare.’