Isabella Blow, the magnificent muse who brilliantly wore Manolos, Treacy and red lipstick on her teeth
Yes reader, I knew her, and she was absolutely marvellous.
My first memory of Isabella Blow, was aptly at the Manolo Blahnik store in Chelsea. I was there with Debbi Mason, who was the uber-stylist who had been Fashion Director of UK ELLE, and at the time was close to her due date for her daughter Lily. Just as I was to do years later, Debbi worked through her pregnancy, and was somewhat nervous her waters would break in front of Evangeline, Manolo’s magnificent sister; Isabella, was of course buying shoes. I thought the shoes were like jewels and the way they invoked Georgian and Medieval references felt sublime.
I was to sit next to Isabella for several months at British Vogue a few years later, when after travelling in Asia I came back both to the UK, and fashion assisting. She was at the time pushing Alexander McQueen, Philip Treacy and now less well remembered, Owen Gaster. She insisted we called him Alexander, so unlike everyone else it seems, I never knew him by his first name, Lee. We would call his Mum’s house on her 081 number to call in samples, and as he was on the dole, meaning he had a lot of time on his hands, he along with Detmar Blow, Isabella’s husband and his sister, tailor Selina, would come in to the Vogue offices almost daily. I have a memory of going to her flat in Elizabeth Street to see Owen Gaster and Philip Treacy samples. I took her to meet tailor Mark Powell up a windy staircase in Soho for a menswear shoot and she was exhilarated by his Cockney swagger and “ I dress the Krays’ schtick. There is no doubt that if she believed in someone’s talent, she was visceral in her celebration of your talents and would call, cajoule, push and promote you to everyone she could: from her extensive Rolodex, to the rest of the Vogue fashion department.
Tiina Laakkonen, a Finnish former model, who then worked closely with Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, was dating British musician Dan Donovan, hence taking a job as Junior Fashion Editor at Vogue in London, was often pushed into the fashion cupboard to try on Alexander’s “bumsters”. These really were cut very low, a marriage of tailoring at its Savile Row best, with a punk distain, as well as literal stains, which his early bumsters came with.
Isabella had recently bought Alexander’s entire graduate collection for £5000, paying in instalments of £100 a week, as while Isabella was from the aristocracy, she told me quite candidly that she had been disinherited by her father Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton (son of Happy Valley’s ‘Jock’ Delves Broughton for anyone who has seen the film White Mischief). Her brother had died in an accident when only a toddler, and the British aristocracy still runs on the rights of male inheritance, like a latter-day French royal family Salic Law. Meaning Isabella lived in many ways just like all of us: travelling by bus, earning a pittance (Conde Nast was never the most potent of payers), and living with family traumas, which gave urgency in her push to promote and nurture talent. Especially, those like her with flaws, like Alexander.
Detmar’s Hilles House is an Arts and Crafts sprawling villa in Gloucestershire and she would often take Alexander, and others she supported, there for weekends, coaxing him on points of history, culture, in many ways a latter-day Lady Ottoline Morell, who as writer Charlie Porter discussed with me for a Front Row to Front Bench podcast on the Bloomsbury Set, was derided for her eccentricities, yet used for her connections. Isabella took fashion seriously. I assisted her on a shoot at the old Hartnell atelier in Mayfair, and she insisted on silence. Insisted - as this was fashion. Capital F. At Hartnell. Who had dressed the Queen. For Vogue. Most shoots happen in a space filled with music, chatter and gossip. Not her’s.
For Isabella, fashion was not light, it was transformative and important. She told me once, and I will always remember this, how the Sir John Soanes Museum, which she had just been to visit at lunchtime, was “sexy”, and that most stylists would not know a Medieval brooch if they saw one. She knew her references, she had a vast intellect, and she was a curious mix of candid, with a great honking laugh, and seriousness.
Over the years I would see Isabella at shows in Paris, underneath a giant Treacy brim, or in London at parties, as my friend Pablo de la Barra ran an art gallery with Detmar, and she remained this unique mix of candid and fabulous. She told me about falling in love with a Venetian gondolier, which was incredibly her, during a separation with Detmar, but I always felt his love for her was deep, true and gentle. Alexander had not given her a role when he achieved success, and given I was there, I know how intrinsic she was in promoting him when no one else cared, would it have hurt to give her a role when he landed the Givenchy Creative Directorship, which I know cut her deeply, adding to her depression. She was also dealing with ovarian cancer, bipolar disorder, and childhood trauma.
One of these on their own is a lot, in combination, these are massive obstacles. So I was sad of course to hear of her suicide, and horrified that she had drunk weed killer, given her several previous attempts, one included jumping from a motorway bridge, I was sad but not surprised. I attended her memorial, which included a eulogy from Anna Wintour, who had been her employer at US Vogue, sat behind Joan Collins and my heart burst for her, as I wondered whether she realised when she was alive how loved she was, how special she was, how important she was.
So like any of us who were there then, and for many of you who weren’t, but now perhaps see the 90s and the noughties through a vaseline hazed veneer of nostalgia, the news that Andrea Riseborough will play Isabella for the upcoming film The Queen of Fashion (great title), currently in post production, is really exciting. In the way you hope to god they get it right. Riseborough will be on our screens wearing the Isabella Blow archive, as Daphne Guinness who bought the lot when Isabella died, and showed it at a deeply moving exhibition after her death at Somerset House, has loaned the collection, Philip Treacy has given full access to his archive, while Manolo Blahnik have reconstructed shoes. We know at least the clothes will be right. And judging by the casting reveal, I think the film holds real hope in being so too. Richard E. Grant as her father is camp British genius. Director Alex Marx has been 9 years in production.
I wonder what Isabella would have made of it all. I think she would have honked with laughter from under a veiled creation, and reapplied her red MAC lipstick or Fracas perfume, with a wicked smile on her lips.