RIP Isabella Blow 1958-2007
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j´adore dior
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All of this is so..., how can i say, i just found out about it about 30 minutes ago, i started searching and reading, and wow!, Isabella was amazing, a few days ago i was thinking about her, i once saw her in Paris outside a Dior show wearing all black and white Dior, she looked so amazing as usual...
What a sad loos but at the same time the way she did it, it sounds or makes me feel that it was so "dramatic" as her life was, it feels so, i don´t know, is like reading the life of a great artist, who suicided in an strange way and will always have an influence on those who followed her, now her coffin and the hat creation on it... it feels like we are living something that future generations will read about it and say wow, what a fascinating woman she was...
I hope that wherever she is now will be stylish enaugh for her, but im sure, if not, she will make it.
What a sad loos but at the same time the way she did it, it sounds or makes me feel that it was so "dramatic" as her life was, it feels so, i don´t know, is like reading the life of a great artist, who suicided in an strange way and will always have an influence on those who followed her, now her coffin and the hat creation on it... it feels like we are living something that future generations will read about it and say wow, what a fascinating woman she was...
I hope that wherever she is now will be stylish enaugh for her, but im sure, if not, she will make it.
Oh no, I just heard this today. How unbelievably sad!!! I loved Isabella she was so spirited and her style was wicked, this is really a shock... i don't know what to say, this has completely ruined my day... condolences to her poor family & friends. She was a truly unique lady!
jennifer~
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I thought it made sense to post this, a lovely tribute which fits with the lovely memorial articles some have shared already...
catwalkqueen.tvHats on parade for Isabella Blow's final farewell
Actors, socialites and friends from the fashion industry all turned out yesterday to say their final farewells to fashion stylist Isabella Blow. There was a show of hats and elaborate fascinators in the crowd of 250 guests who attended Blow's funeral held at Gloucester Cathedral in Gloucestershire. Among the mourners were Sophie Dahl, Alexander McQueen, Tara Palmer Tomkinson and actor Rupert Everett who read a tribute to the style diva. Blow passed away last week after taking weedkiller, the third time she had allegedly tried to take her own life. Her funeral was indeed a glamorous affair but I'm sure she wouldn't have wanted it any other way.
Rupert Everett and Sophie Dahl attend Isabella Blow's funeral.
A sea of elaborate hats and head pieces pay tribute to Blow's distinctive style.
[Images: Getty]
misssakura
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That last headpiece is fabulous! I want it.
here is an absolutely touching article from her husband Detmar Blow's perspective; he had so much love for her, its so very sad.
Section: Features, pg. 10 - News Review
Isabella Blow, who died last week, helped form the modern fashion scene. But
her husband Detmar Blow explains her troubled history
I met Issy at a friend's wedding in Salisbury Cathedral. I was standing
outside when this extraordinary girl walked by. I told her I liked her hat. She
told me she liked my jacket. My grandfather was a Sri Lankan ambassador and I
was wearing one of his, trimmed with gold brocade. So the hat and coat got
together, as it were, and we loved one another from that moment until last
week, when Issy died.
I have been overwhelmed by all the tributes to her and Issy would have been
thrilled to know how highly she was regarded. Geordie Greig, the editor of
Tatler, said she "was without doubt one of the great figures of fashion in the
20th century".
Issy always looked amazing, but inside she was very insecure and lacking in
self-confidence. But no one had her judgment or her wonderful eye: she spotted
the milliner Philip Treacy and the designer Alexander McQueen long before
anyone else.
She saw the extraordinary beauty in models Sophie Dahl and Honor Fraser and
Stella Tennant (though technically Plum Sykes, who was Issy's assistant, found
Stella - Issy had asked her to round up some beautiful society friends). It
annoys me when people call Issy eccentric -to me that describes the sort of
person who eats goldfish. She worked every day. She didn't care a thing about
turning up on time, but she never stopped thinking about her work and how to be
creative.
I was entranced by her from the start. I invited her to dinner -she turned up
in a silver skirt and a bandana with her little feet in Manolo Blahniks -then
down to the country for the weekend. I had a girlfriend at the time who was
jealous and looking daggers at me. In Gloucestershire we went for walks and
Issy told me she loved the countryside.
The next day I rang her and said I was coming up to London to get my hair cut.
When we met I told her: "I don't want to have an affair with you, I want to
marry you." That was 16 days after we met. She said yes straight away.
People were amazed because though I was exotic and bohemian I was quite rural.
The Blows' glory days were gone and we were pretty much hillbillies. I said to
Issy that I hardly ever got girlfriends and she said: "That's because you don't
have a fast car and take cocaine." But she didn't seem to mind.
When I first met Issy my sense was, "Wow, you've got talent". But she didn't
realise that. She hung around with a lot of beautiful people but they weren't
talented, they were rich. I saw myself as giving her a platform. So we set up
home in London and she loved the idea of becoming a patroness.
My mother had a run-down house in Belgravia. Issy had met Philip Treacy around
the same time as me and he was soon installed in the basement, followed later
by Alexander McQueen. So she could do something to really help the people she
believed in.
Philip was still a student at the Royal College of Art then and the first
thing he showed her was a green felt hat with jagged, crocodile teeth edges.
She wore his hats ever after, hats in the shape of lobsters or sailing ships.
She spotted Alexander McQueen in 1993. She went around championing him and
people laughed, saying he made theatre clothes. But she knew how talented he
was.
In 1996, when he got the job of head designer at Givenchy, she was delighted.
We saw him after one of his Paris shows and she said: "I expect you've seen
lots of people like me today," and he said: "Issy, there's no one like you."
Issy went to work for Anna Wintour at Vogue. It made me laugh last week when
Anna said she'd never been good at getting in before 11am, but then she'd turn
up dressed as a maharaja or an Edith Sitwell figure. But she was frustrated.
You can't really be creative working in an office. That's what she really loved
later on about working at The Sunday Times. Nobody expected to see her in the
office, they wanted her out there, looking for talent.
Everything was going well for her at work but Issy wanted a child and when we
tried, nothing happened. She went through IVF but it didn't work. There was
nothing wrong with Issy and nothing wrong with me. It just didn't happen. She
said we were like two exotic fruits who couldn't breed.
So that was very hard for her. And she always carried a burden from her
childhood.
She was the granddaughter of Sir Jock Delves Broughton, who was acquitted of
murdering the Earl of Erroll in the notorious White Mischief case. When she was
four her two-year-old brother brother died in a freak accident.
It was a nice sunny afternoon, her mother was going upstairs to put lipstick
on, her father was laying out the drinks, people were coming round for drinks,
and her brother fell into the swimming pool and drowned. It finished her
parents' marriage pretty much.
Later on when her mother walked out -when Issy was 14 -she shook Issy and her
sister by the hand and said goodbye. When Issy died she hadn't seen her mother
for eight years. After she left, Issy's stepmother arrived with her stepsisters
and Issy was more or less told, "You're out". So she had a lot to deal with.
During her twenties she was super-insecure. I tried to give her confidence,
but Issy had no love from her parents and that's really difficult. I don't have
children, but I know they need love, the sort of love I had from my parents. So
that was the root of her depression later on. It's no secret that she tried to
kill herself with pills and car crashes and jumping off bridges.
She once called the National Trust and found out where Virginia Woolf's house
was, intending to end her life there. She rang them up and they said the river
didn't have any water in it. So having failed to do a Virginia Woolf, she tried
to do an Anna Karenina. It was difficult to live with, but I loved her and I
was well trained: my father suffered depression and killed himself when I was
13. Very talented people often suffer problems. It's the price one pays.
Then last year she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I'd guessed something
was wrong and brought her down to the country. When the blood tests came back
they were inconclusive, but when they opened her up she was riddled with it.
Last Saturday I brought her downstairs where she could look out onto the
fields.
On Sunday she took a turn for the worse. She said: "I love you," but there was
no great speech. She was fighting for breath. She knew she wanted to die and it
seems she helped things along (preliminary toxicology reports suggest she drank
Paraquat, the weedkiller).
My life will go on, but in a way I can't imagine: I've become addicted to
drama.
Issy will stay in everyone's memory. I sent my business partner a message
saying she had died. He texted back: "Long live Queen Isabella."
Copyright (C) The Sunday Times, 2007
Section: Features, pg. 10 - News Review
Isabella Blow, who died last week, helped form the modern fashion scene. But
her husband Detmar Blow explains her troubled history
I met Issy at a friend's wedding in Salisbury Cathedral. I was standing
outside when this extraordinary girl walked by. I told her I liked her hat. She
told me she liked my jacket. My grandfather was a Sri Lankan ambassador and I
was wearing one of his, trimmed with gold brocade. So the hat and coat got
together, as it were, and we loved one another from that moment until last
week, when Issy died.
I have been overwhelmed by all the tributes to her and Issy would have been
thrilled to know how highly she was regarded. Geordie Greig, the editor of
Tatler, said she "was without doubt one of the great figures of fashion in the
20th century".
Issy always looked amazing, but inside she was very insecure and lacking in
self-confidence. But no one had her judgment or her wonderful eye: she spotted
the milliner Philip Treacy and the designer Alexander McQueen long before
anyone else.
She saw the extraordinary beauty in models Sophie Dahl and Honor Fraser and
Stella Tennant (though technically Plum Sykes, who was Issy's assistant, found
Stella - Issy had asked her to round up some beautiful society friends). It
annoys me when people call Issy eccentric -to me that describes the sort of
person who eats goldfish. She worked every day. She didn't care a thing about
turning up on time, but she never stopped thinking about her work and how to be
creative.
I was entranced by her from the start. I invited her to dinner -she turned up
in a silver skirt and a bandana with her little feet in Manolo Blahniks -then
down to the country for the weekend. I had a girlfriend at the time who was
jealous and looking daggers at me. In Gloucestershire we went for walks and
Issy told me she loved the countryside.
The next day I rang her and said I was coming up to London to get my hair cut.
When we met I told her: "I don't want to have an affair with you, I want to
marry you." That was 16 days after we met. She said yes straight away.
People were amazed because though I was exotic and bohemian I was quite rural.
The Blows' glory days were gone and we were pretty much hillbillies. I said to
Issy that I hardly ever got girlfriends and she said: "That's because you don't
have a fast car and take cocaine." But she didn't seem to mind.
When I first met Issy my sense was, "Wow, you've got talent". But she didn't
realise that. She hung around with a lot of beautiful people but they weren't
talented, they were rich. I saw myself as giving her a platform. So we set up
home in London and she loved the idea of becoming a patroness.
My mother had a run-down house in Belgravia. Issy had met Philip Treacy around
the same time as me and he was soon installed in the basement, followed later
by Alexander McQueen. So she could do something to really help the people she
believed in.
Philip was still a student at the Royal College of Art then and the first
thing he showed her was a green felt hat with jagged, crocodile teeth edges.
She wore his hats ever after, hats in the shape of lobsters or sailing ships.
She spotted Alexander McQueen in 1993. She went around championing him and
people laughed, saying he made theatre clothes. But she knew how talented he
was.
In 1996, when he got the job of head designer at Givenchy, she was delighted.
We saw him after one of his Paris shows and she said: "I expect you've seen
lots of people like me today," and he said: "Issy, there's no one like you."
Issy went to work for Anna Wintour at Vogue. It made me laugh last week when
Anna said she'd never been good at getting in before 11am, but then she'd turn
up dressed as a maharaja or an Edith Sitwell figure. But she was frustrated.
You can't really be creative working in an office. That's what she really loved
later on about working at The Sunday Times. Nobody expected to see her in the
office, they wanted her out there, looking for talent.
Everything was going well for her at work but Issy wanted a child and when we
tried, nothing happened. She went through IVF but it didn't work. There was
nothing wrong with Issy and nothing wrong with me. It just didn't happen. She
said we were like two exotic fruits who couldn't breed.
So that was very hard for her. And she always carried a burden from her
childhood.
She was the granddaughter of Sir Jock Delves Broughton, who was acquitted of
murdering the Earl of Erroll in the notorious White Mischief case. When she was
four her two-year-old brother brother died in a freak accident.
It was a nice sunny afternoon, her mother was going upstairs to put lipstick
on, her father was laying out the drinks, people were coming round for drinks,
and her brother fell into the swimming pool and drowned. It finished her
parents' marriage pretty much.
Later on when her mother walked out -when Issy was 14 -she shook Issy and her
sister by the hand and said goodbye. When Issy died she hadn't seen her mother
for eight years. After she left, Issy's stepmother arrived with her stepsisters
and Issy was more or less told, "You're out". So she had a lot to deal with.
During her twenties she was super-insecure. I tried to give her confidence,
but Issy had no love from her parents and that's really difficult. I don't have
children, but I know they need love, the sort of love I had from my parents. So
that was the root of her depression later on. It's no secret that she tried to
kill herself with pills and car crashes and jumping off bridges.
She once called the National Trust and found out where Virginia Woolf's house
was, intending to end her life there. She rang them up and they said the river
didn't have any water in it. So having failed to do a Virginia Woolf, she tried
to do an Anna Karenina. It was difficult to live with, but I loved her and I
was well trained: my father suffered depression and killed himself when I was
13. Very talented people often suffer problems. It's the price one pays.
Then last year she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I'd guessed something
was wrong and brought her down to the country. When the blood tests came back
they were inconclusive, but when they opened her up she was riddled with it.
Last Saturday I brought her downstairs where she could look out onto the
fields.
On Sunday she took a turn for the worse. She said: "I love you," but there was
no great speech. She was fighting for breath. She knew she wanted to die and it
seems she helped things along (preliminary toxicology reports suggest she drank
Paraquat, the weedkiller).
My life will go on, but in a way I can't imagine: I've become addicted to
drama.
Issy will stay in everyone's memory. I sent my business partner a message
saying she had died. He texted back: "Long live Queen Isabella."
Copyright (C) The Sunday Times, 2007
MulletProof
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from diane pernet's blog. 
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Thank you for posting that article ponytrot, such a sad read.
Colin Mcdowell wrote a tribute to her in The Sunday Times Style Magazine.
{timesonline}
Fashion fabulous
Strikingly dressed and full of maverick energy, Isabella Blow was the ultimate fashionista. Colin McDowell explains why her recent death has left the world a greyer place
I first became aware of Isabella Blow in Paris. I was at the Gare du Nord when I saw an energetic woman, wearing Manolos and an entirely ludicrous hat, directing a couple of harassed assistants, a husband and two drivers as they put a mountain of luggage into two large Mercedes. “ Vite, vite!” she called crisply. I knew I was witnessing a fashion power at full throttle.
Only a few seasons later, I was working with her. Issy, as she was always known, was the fashion director of Style for four gloriously hectic and glamorous years. She joined in 1997, and I admit I was doubtful. Her extravagance was already the stuff of legend. “She’ll cost us a fortune,” I told the editor. And she did. But she also upped the ante as nobody else could have. She commissioned Mario Testino, who photographed a heavily made-up Freddie Windsor, and David LaChapelle, who photographed Sophie Dahl in a bath of baked beans, and Iris Palmer looking amazing as Mary, Queen of Scots.
Her cavalier disregard for money caused headaches. It was nothing for Issy to commission an obscure jeweller from, say, Latvia, to have a necklace expensively couriered in for the shoot, then to decide not to use it. She even once mislaid a one-off Christian Dior mink coat on a shoot. Above all, though, she brought class, excitement and fun – she was perpetually dressed for an embassy cocktail party.
And Issy was always susceptible to young men – not, I think, for their bodies, but for their poetic aura. Hers was a romantic world – part Wuthering Heights, part Brideshead Revisited and with quite a touch of Transylvanian gothic. It was a world where decadence was to be flirted with. Byron may have been the starting point, but the sort of hero Issy liked was hollow-eyed and dangerous-looking, Baudelaire style. She was forever discovering the next “great” photographer, usually from middle Europe or South America. They all seemed identical: gaunt-looking, as if they had been sleeping rough for a week (and they probably had). They would use her power outrageously. Issy knew it and didn’t care. It amused her to be seen with young guys who looked as if they had just stepped from the pages of Les Fleurs du mal.
Behind the irrepressible fizz and sense of fun, however, Issy built a serious fashion legacy. She was a pioneer – and usually sound promoter – of emerging design talent. Among those who owe her a huge debt for the kick-start her enthusiastic promotion gave their careers are Julien Macdonald, Alexander McQueen (she bought his entire first collection, paying for it in instalments), Philip Treacy (for whom she provided accommodation when he first came to London from Ireland) and John Galliano.
Issy’s family lineage was as impeccable and exotic as the glamorous world she inhabited. Her family had lived at Doddington Castle, in Cheshire, for more than 500 years. Socially, she knew exactly where she stood, and for that reason she was no snob. She had the common touch and could fight her corner with anybody. I was once waiting for a taxi with her in darkest Waterloo. We had just left her avant-garde worker’s cottage, with its blue-glass garden and vast, glass-sided bath. “You must come round on bath night,” she trilled. “It can hold four boys at one time.” She was wearing one of those hats, a great deal of make-up, a cocktail dress (Issy never did day – at any hour, she was dressed for the night), a chinchilla stole and staggeringly high heels. A woman shouted: “You look bloody ridiculous.” Without turning a hair, she replied: “And you don’t look so bloody hot yourself, ducky.”
Obviously, much of the effect was carefully calculated. Organising her wardrobe for the collections took her harassed assistants weeks. And she never did ordinary. Issy was interested in fashion with a capital “F”. Mere clothes engaged her not at all. If she had heard of Topshop, she certainly never referred to it. She hated New York and Milan; for her, true fashion was found in Paris alone – with London thrown in for its off-the-wall approaches.
She understood that, apart from its top reaches, fashion is bourgeois and, therefore, of little lasting creative interest. That is why she wore the same clothes in the country as she would in town. And she was totally unselfconscious. She could walk through Hanover Square wearing a priceless Dior coat, smoking a cigarette, and have no idea how startlingly exotic she looked among the anoraks and jeans. Once, when inviting me to the family home of her husband, Detmar, she warned me that it was icy cold. “I have to wear my Schiaparelli monkey-fur coat when I’m cooking Detmar’s bacon and eggs for breakfast,” she said, providing me with a mental picture that I will always cherish.
Rabelaisian, subtle, bold, insecure, vulnerable, shy, outrageous, idealistic – Isabella Blow was all of those things at times. She didn’t just impress people because of her exotic and sexy appearance, although she had a great figure and marvellous legs. What was so endearing about her was the way she could send herself up so perfectly. At the time when photographers had a feeding frenzy every time she wore a new hat, she said to me: “I feel like Mary, Queen of Scots. Everybody wants my head.” Without her, the fashion world is a much duller place.
Colin Mcdowell wrote a tribute to her in The Sunday Times Style Magazine.
{timesonline}
Fashion fabulous
Strikingly dressed and full of maverick energy, Isabella Blow was the ultimate fashionista. Colin McDowell explains why her recent death has left the world a greyer place
I first became aware of Isabella Blow in Paris. I was at the Gare du Nord when I saw an energetic woman, wearing Manolos and an entirely ludicrous hat, directing a couple of harassed assistants, a husband and two drivers as they put a mountain of luggage into two large Mercedes. “ Vite, vite!” she called crisply. I knew I was witnessing a fashion power at full throttle.
Only a few seasons later, I was working with her. Issy, as she was always known, was the fashion director of Style for four gloriously hectic and glamorous years. She joined in 1997, and I admit I was doubtful. Her extravagance was already the stuff of legend. “She’ll cost us a fortune,” I told the editor. And she did. But she also upped the ante as nobody else could have. She commissioned Mario Testino, who photographed a heavily made-up Freddie Windsor, and David LaChapelle, who photographed Sophie Dahl in a bath of baked beans, and Iris Palmer looking amazing as Mary, Queen of Scots.
Her cavalier disregard for money caused headaches. It was nothing for Issy to commission an obscure jeweller from, say, Latvia, to have a necklace expensively couriered in for the shoot, then to decide not to use it. She even once mislaid a one-off Christian Dior mink coat on a shoot. Above all, though, she brought class, excitement and fun – she was perpetually dressed for an embassy cocktail party.
And Issy was always susceptible to young men – not, I think, for their bodies, but for their poetic aura. Hers was a romantic world – part Wuthering Heights, part Brideshead Revisited and with quite a touch of Transylvanian gothic. It was a world where decadence was to be flirted with. Byron may have been the starting point, but the sort of hero Issy liked was hollow-eyed and dangerous-looking, Baudelaire style. She was forever discovering the next “great” photographer, usually from middle Europe or South America. They all seemed identical: gaunt-looking, as if they had been sleeping rough for a week (and they probably had). They would use her power outrageously. Issy knew it and didn’t care. It amused her to be seen with young guys who looked as if they had just stepped from the pages of Les Fleurs du mal.
Behind the irrepressible fizz and sense of fun, however, Issy built a serious fashion legacy. She was a pioneer – and usually sound promoter – of emerging design talent. Among those who owe her a huge debt for the kick-start her enthusiastic promotion gave their careers are Julien Macdonald, Alexander McQueen (she bought his entire first collection, paying for it in instalments), Philip Treacy (for whom she provided accommodation when he first came to London from Ireland) and John Galliano.
Issy’s family lineage was as impeccable and exotic as the glamorous world she inhabited. Her family had lived at Doddington Castle, in Cheshire, for more than 500 years. Socially, she knew exactly where she stood, and for that reason she was no snob. She had the common touch and could fight her corner with anybody. I was once waiting for a taxi with her in darkest Waterloo. We had just left her avant-garde worker’s cottage, with its blue-glass garden and vast, glass-sided bath. “You must come round on bath night,” she trilled. “It can hold four boys at one time.” She was wearing one of those hats, a great deal of make-up, a cocktail dress (Issy never did day – at any hour, she was dressed for the night), a chinchilla stole and staggeringly high heels. A woman shouted: “You look bloody ridiculous.” Without turning a hair, she replied: “And you don’t look so bloody hot yourself, ducky.”
Obviously, much of the effect was carefully calculated. Organising her wardrobe for the collections took her harassed assistants weeks. And she never did ordinary. Issy was interested in fashion with a capital “F”. Mere clothes engaged her not at all. If she had heard of Topshop, she certainly never referred to it. She hated New York and Milan; for her, true fashion was found in Paris alone – with London thrown in for its off-the-wall approaches.
She understood that, apart from its top reaches, fashion is bourgeois and, therefore, of little lasting creative interest. That is why she wore the same clothes in the country as she would in town. And she was totally unselfconscious. She could walk through Hanover Square wearing a priceless Dior coat, smoking a cigarette, and have no idea how startlingly exotic she looked among the anoraks and jeans. Once, when inviting me to the family home of her husband, Detmar, she warned me that it was icy cold. “I have to wear my Schiaparelli monkey-fur coat when I’m cooking Detmar’s bacon and eggs for breakfast,” she said, providing me with a mental picture that I will always cherish.
Rabelaisian, subtle, bold, insecure, vulnerable, shy, outrageous, idealistic – Isabella Blow was all of those things at times. She didn’t just impress people because of her exotic and sexy appearance, although she had a great figure and marvellous legs. What was so endearing about her was the way she could send herself up so perfectly. At the time when photographers had a feeding frenzy every time she wore a new hat, she said to me: “I feel like Mary, Queen of Scots. Everybody wants my head.” Without her, the fashion world is a much duller place.
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Eccentricity is slowly dying! We need more eccentrics to prove that there are people out there who march to their own drummer!
She was fab! Loved the hat that Phillip Treacy did that was on top of her coffin.
She was fab! Loved the hat that Phillip Treacy did that was on top of her coffin.
well,it was confirmed tuesday,by the coroner that issy indeed too her own life by taking the weed killer,paraquat.
it's terribly sad how much we really didn't know or understand about her....obviously a tragic and difficult life. may she indeed rest in peace.
*ashadedviewonfashion.com
it's terribly sad how much we really didn't know or understand about her....obviously a tragic and difficult life. may she indeed rest in peace.
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le go garçon 84
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so sad to see special people go, may she rest in peace. amen
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RIP Isabela Blow: A thread in honor
Since no one on TFS has sais anything I thought I would alert the world of TFS of the death of a beloved person in fashion. Isabela Blow. Yes, dead the famed admirer of Philip tracy and Alerxander Mcqueen is suddenly dead. So I thought it would be nice to post editorials and other things she has done in fashion.
It was little over a month later that Isabella Blow was found dead at her country home in Gloucestershire. Unlike Robinson, on whom information is scant, Blow was complicit in the documentation of her life in print: the late Editor of Tatler and former Director of The Sunday Times’ Style Magazine was never one to be troubled by the rules of propriety. Blow was an aesthete of the original Wildean order, with a temperament so sophisticated in its cultural breadth and outlandishness, it seemed to exist beyond the law. The idiom that Blow brought to her art direction was one of the last glimmers of a golden age in fashion publishing; an era when editors like Diana Vreeland could coordinate photoshoots on Tahitian beaches from an office in Manhattan. A reputation for artistic extravagance marked Blow out from her contemporaries but her astronomical spending on shoots created unease. Later in her career, perhaps thanks to the bourgeois corporate unction that smothers so many fashion offices, her ideas could leave colleagues perplexed, costing her jobs and leaving her struggling financially. With low points that would converge with Vreeland’s, an editor also made to feel the cold shoulder of publishing toward the end of her career, Blow’s story is perhaps proof that fashion does not value eccentricity as much as it would first have you believe.
Blow was, however defiantly resolved in her mission to champion the artists and designers about whom she felt most passionately, even if this meant putting them up in her mother-in-law’s basement for months on end. Without such displays of altruism, she would have been unable to bring designers like Alexander McQueen and Philip Treacy to pre-eminence. She claimed that her passion for fashion bordered on insanity, yet it was through her pragmatism in helping new artists that her own creativity flourished most gloriously.
In contrast with Robinson’s discreet obituaries there was much coverage speculating on the circumstances of Isabella Blow’s death. Blow was notoriously candid with her emotions and known for opening up over the telephone to those she barely knew. A self-confessed depressive, it was no secret that she had made several attempts at suicide. Neither did she conceal her rarefied but traumatic upbringing, during which she suffered the loss of a close younger brother and experienced the froideur of a mother who walked out of her life at age 14. Life trajectories all too often seem to take on a nightmarish storybook quality when viewed on completion. In fact with the classic hallmarks of a ‘fast’ background and a thwarted childhood, the final chapter of Blow’s life might even appear pre-destined.
Many tags have been pinned on Blow, ‘eccentric/bonkers’ being the most common, yet these are sorely inadequate in describing an individual who, on account of her background, was placed in an atypically difficult position. From an upper class family, she was abandoned by her mother, disinherited by her father, and left £5000 from a family fortune of millions. This meant she had to scrape it together as a cleaner along with a string of other menial jobs before moving to New York to begin her career. Blow’s death raises uncomfortable issues of class, identity and understanding in an industry where it is doubtful her personal history ever elicited much real empathy.
Blow was a rarity in the British fashion press, an area of the industry currently sorely at risk of becoming overwrought by stale and excessively self-referential content. British fashion was very fortunate to have such an unrelentingly un-bourgeois doyenne in its ranks, especially one who could summon a repertoire of far-flung cultural references with such fearless irreverence. If the future of fashion print lies in the hands of the Fashion Communications or Media graduate who may choose to rely on the formulaic solutions they are supplied on lecture handouts, then the British fashion media may find itself in a state of crippling mediocrity sooner than it thinks.
Fashion is not a sensibility that can be taught after all; it is an arena that is pushed forward by febrile originality and visual extremity. Qualities represented in the legacies of Steven Robinson and Isabella Blow.(www.showstudio.com )
Since no one on TFS has sais anything I thought I would alert the world of TFS of the death of a beloved person in fashion. Isabela Blow. Yes, dead the famed admirer of Philip tracy and Alerxander Mcqueen is suddenly dead. So I thought it would be nice to post editorials and other things she has done in fashion.
It was little over a month later that Isabella Blow was found dead at her country home in Gloucestershire. Unlike Robinson, on whom information is scant, Blow was complicit in the documentation of her life in print: the late Editor of Tatler and former Director of The Sunday Times’ Style Magazine was never one to be troubled by the rules of propriety. Blow was an aesthete of the original Wildean order, with a temperament so sophisticated in its cultural breadth and outlandishness, it seemed to exist beyond the law. The idiom that Blow brought to her art direction was one of the last glimmers of a golden age in fashion publishing; an era when editors like Diana Vreeland could coordinate photoshoots on Tahitian beaches from an office in Manhattan. A reputation for artistic extravagance marked Blow out from her contemporaries but her astronomical spending on shoots created unease. Later in her career, perhaps thanks to the bourgeois corporate unction that smothers so many fashion offices, her ideas could leave colleagues perplexed, costing her jobs and leaving her struggling financially. With low points that would converge with Vreeland’s, an editor also made to feel the cold shoulder of publishing toward the end of her career, Blow’s story is perhaps proof that fashion does not value eccentricity as much as it would first have you believe.
Blow was, however defiantly resolved in her mission to champion the artists and designers about whom she felt most passionately, even if this meant putting them up in her mother-in-law’s basement for months on end. Without such displays of altruism, she would have been unable to bring designers like Alexander McQueen and Philip Treacy to pre-eminence. She claimed that her passion for fashion bordered on insanity, yet it was through her pragmatism in helping new artists that her own creativity flourished most gloriously.
In contrast with Robinson’s discreet obituaries there was much coverage speculating on the circumstances of Isabella Blow’s death. Blow was notoriously candid with her emotions and known for opening up over the telephone to those she barely knew. A self-confessed depressive, it was no secret that she had made several attempts at suicide. Neither did she conceal her rarefied but traumatic upbringing, during which she suffered the loss of a close younger brother and experienced the froideur of a mother who walked out of her life at age 14. Life trajectories all too often seem to take on a nightmarish storybook quality when viewed on completion. In fact with the classic hallmarks of a ‘fast’ background and a thwarted childhood, the final chapter of Blow’s life might even appear pre-destined.
Many tags have been pinned on Blow, ‘eccentric/bonkers’ being the most common, yet these are sorely inadequate in describing an individual who, on account of her background, was placed in an atypically difficult position. From an upper class family, she was abandoned by her mother, disinherited by her father, and left £5000 from a family fortune of millions. This meant she had to scrape it together as a cleaner along with a string of other menial jobs before moving to New York to begin her career. Blow’s death raises uncomfortable issues of class, identity and understanding in an industry where it is doubtful her personal history ever elicited much real empathy.
Blow was a rarity in the British fashion press, an area of the industry currently sorely at risk of becoming overwrought by stale and excessively self-referential content. British fashion was very fortunate to have such an unrelentingly un-bourgeois doyenne in its ranks, especially one who could summon a repertoire of far-flung cultural references with such fearless irreverence. If the future of fashion print lies in the hands of the Fashion Communications or Media graduate who may choose to rely on the formulaic solutions they are supplied on lecture handouts, then the British fashion media may find itself in a state of crippling mediocrity sooner than it thinks.
Fashion is not a sensibility that can be taught after all; it is an arena that is pushed forward by febrile originality and visual extremity. Qualities represented in the legacies of Steven Robinson and Isabella Blow.(www.showstudio.com )
