Lula Landry and Guy Somé

Lula Landry and Guy Somé’s friendship is both personal and professional: he is a designer whose clothes help establish her public image, and he describes her as his muse and someone he loves. Their closeness gives him an intimate view of her loyalties and hopes, but it also makes his account partial, shaped by grief, anger, and the conviction that the family she longed to belong to had harmed her.

Friendship and a chosen family

Somé recalls urging Lula to leave her family behind and move on. In his view, she continued to invest in the Bristows even when their influence made her unhappy; his metaphor of her repeatedly flogging a dead horse expresses his frustration with her inability to let go. He saw that persistence not as indifference but as a defining part of her attachment to people she hoped would love her.

He also describes his own relationship with Lula in familial terms. When she reconciled with Evan Duffield while Somé was in Japan, he felt excluded and believed she had waited for his absence because she knew he disapproved of Duffield. His claim that they were like family makes the disagreement more than a difference of opinion: Somé regarded his judgment as carrying emotional weight for her, even as Lula made a choice without him.

Work, ambition, and money

Their friendship was bound to Somé’s fashion business. He says Lula’s major break came when she wore his Jagged dress in a Vogue shoot, and that people came to associate her with his designs. The professional partnership then grew into a proposed five-million-pound contract for Lula to front a new accessories range. Somé says he had designed the collection for her and saw it as a career-making opportunity; he also expected her to help launch his brand.

Somé resented Lula’s effort to secure the best terms. He suspected her brother’s accountant had encouraged her to hold out for more money, and contrasted the negotiation with what he considered her former willingness to trust him. His indignation exposes a conflict between personal loyalty and commercial value: he speaks as a friend who believes he helped make her career, but also as a designer who had built a campaign around her and expected the collaboration to proceed on his terms. He worried that pregnancy might disrupt the campaign and imagined that Lula would leave work to care for a child. This was his speculation, not evidence that she was pregnant; his reaction nonetheless shows how readily he interpreted her private life through the demands of the planned range.

The image and its afterlife

Somé’s campaign image of Lula, titled “Fallen Angels,” became a visible expression of their collaboration. He says he sent her one of each of the four handbags shown in it, including the bag named “Cashile,” and that the bags had African names because he knew of her interest in Africa. Lula had become interested in the continent after her birth mother told her that her father was African, and Somé understood this as a powerful focus for her. His dismissive judgment of the birth mother’s account contrasts with Lula’s investment in it: he doubts the story, while recognizing that it had shaped her hopes and plans.

After Lula’s death, Somé insisted that using the image in the campaign was meant as a tribute to her and to their relationship. He defended the choice against press criticism, emphasizing her beauty and his sense that the image honored her as his muse. The campaign thus carries two meanings at once: it preserves a record of their creative partnership, but it also places Lula’s image back into public circulation at a moment when her death had made that circulation contentious.

Grief, connection, and Rochelle

Somé rejects the conclusion that Lula died by suicide. He tells Strike that his therapist regards this belief as denial and says he is in therapy twice a week. He describes trying Valium after Lula’s death and finding that it left him unable to design; he says it helped him get through her funeral. His grief is therefore presented through both his insistence that her death cannot have been suicide and the practical disruption of his work and daily life.

His account of Lula’s open windows offers another way of understanding what he believed she was seeking. He says she habitually opened them, even in freezing weather, because she could not bear silence and wanted to hear London. He interprets this as an effort to connect with something real, a concern he says they discussed often. In Somé’s telling, the windows were not evidence of a final act but part of a familiar attempt to remain connected to the world outside.

Somé connects that desire for connection to Lula’s friendship with Rochelle Onifade. He says Lula saw Rochelle’s circumstances as a version of what her own life might have been without her beauty and adoption by the Bristows. The comparison illuminates a tension in Somé’s account: he condemns the family Lula continued to seek, yet sees her empathy for Rochelle as rooted in imagining the life she might otherwise have led. Their friendship with Somé is therefore not only a fashion partnership or an intimate bond; as he remembers it, it also gave Lula a language for discussing family, vulnerability, and the search for belonging.