Isabella is dressed in Alexander Mcqueen and wearing a Philip Treacy hat
The incomparable Isabella Blow always pushed boundaries, in the fashion world, often using her personality as her most offensive weapon. Famous for discovering talents such as Philip Treacy, Alexander Mcquenn, Sophie Dahl and Hussein Chalayan, she alsonurtured and ispired many other stylists and designers across the industry. A unique stylist, she worked for Vogue and Tatler in the US and the UK, collaborating with major photographers on breathtaking and often infamous shoots.
Isabella Blow for Alexander Mcqueen
Isabella Blow and Alexander Mcqueen
A few images from the recently published book by Thames & Hudson, Isabella Blow written by Martina Rink.
Isabella Blow in Philip Treacy hats
Philip Treacy
Isabella and Philip Treacy
The Venetian Lace Wing hat worned by Isabella Blow
Isabella Blow in Alexander McQueen hat
The head of Isabella Blow 2002
Isabella Blow with Anna PIaggi
Attemping to capture the essence of Isabella Blow in a few words is a challenge even for those closest to her.A bit of Edith Sitwell, atouch of the Merchesa Casati, across between a Billingsgate fishwife and Lucretia Borgia, Marlene Dietrich and Leigh Bowery, the list of names recalled in an efoort to describe her in as endless as it is unusual. Yet Isabella, to those who knew her either personally or even as the larger than life figure that took centre stage catwalks front rows, was beyond comparison.
Isabella was unique and had no predecessor, in the world where everyone chased the latest fashion designers, she set about discovering and creating them. From the moment she bought the entire degree show of Alexander Mcqueen in 1991 and called upon the student Phillip Treacy to design hats for her wedding, she began a practise of nurturing new talents that would come to define her life in the fashion world. Rarely seen in public without a Treacy hat and matching designer outfit, her appearance was more than matched by her persomality. An increadible ability to anticulate her ideas in tantalising soundbites gave a frequent glimpse into the mind of captivating woman who left an impression on everyone whose lives crossed with her. As well as being one of fashion's great performers, her carrer was punctuated by jobs at Vogue and Tatler, and her desire to give a platform to emergeing designers was only made possible by her own skills as a stylist for the fashion shoots that captured the dark beauty of her own imagination.
Isabella Blow shot by Sean Ellis
From the moment that Anna Wintour, editor in chief at American Vogue, gave Isabella her first major break in 1984, she instanly began to send reverberations throughout the creative community of New York. America and the world got its first introduction to the extraordinary and conflicted personality that was to become a permanet fixture in the fashion world, for the next two decades. Her journey to Vogue has been a long one..
Two years later, following some sleight of hand on her CV, isabella persuaded Anna to take her on at Vogue. Keen to shake off the dust of her Texan existensce, she set about making New York her home immediately, establishing a reputation within the city's artistic community and bringing it, in all its rawness, into the office of Conde Nast itself. Famously, it became common to find the artist Jean Michel Basquiat at Voque, waiting to share the company of Isabella. Pop artist Andy Warhol was another.
From those early days, the unique contrast of high fashion and chaotic discord that was to define her public persona was there in full force. "Once", Anna Wintour recalled in her memorial speech in 2007, "she wore an elaborate sari creation that unravelled as she exited the Conde Nast building on Madison Avenue. She didn't notice or didn't care and hopped into a cab, only to get the fabric caught on the door. The last anyone saw of Issy that day was the silk sari streaming in the tailwind, heading uptown. "The relationship between Isabella and Vogue was more than just professional. In a letter to writer and artist Liza Campbell, Isabella said "Vogue is like joining a church. It is a whole new perspective on life". And for Vogue, the presence of Isabella amongst its congregation was equally inspiring. In Wintours words, "dressing up was about making her job into an event. Issy had the most monderful ability to elevate even the most bsic of tasks of cleaning her desk every night had to be done with the bottle of Perrier water and Channel No 5". By 1986, Isabella's baptism at Conde Nast had set her up for a carreer in fashion, and she moved back to the UK to take a new post at Tatler in London. It was during this period that she began to use her new found influence to start nurturing those that inspired and influenced her.
It was during his first year in 1989, when Philip Treacy, was visiting the offices of Tatler to pick up a hat he had made for a photo shoot, that he was invited to meet someone known as "Issy". In came Isabella, "this very striking and slaughty intimidating woman", in his own words. He "was completely blown away while she asked me some increadibly serious questions, and mentioned that she wore hats". The next day, while he was at college, Isabella got in touch and put in an order for a series of hats for her forthcoming wedding to Detmar Blow. Philip, still a student and with no business to his name, found that isabella was about to bring his career to life for the first time. As fashion editor at Tatler, she had the pick of famous desogners across the world at her fingertips, but her decision to take on an untested student served as a reflection of what motivated her. While everyone else was looking to the catwalks for inspiration, she preferred to wear what she liked, and let the catwalks follow. Her unfailing eye for creative potential meant that her love of fashion went deeper than it did for many who circled the industry, and by daring to invest her faith in new avenues of creativity, she begaan to mould a corner of the fashion world in her own image.
Isabella Blow at Celine, Paris
The synergy between Philip and Isabella emrged from fashion, but while Phillip's hat appeared primarily as objects of aesthetic beauty, she was often quick to give the relationship added depth. Of Isabella Phillip said: " I was so inspire by the way she wore my hats. She wore them like she was not wearing them, like happened to be there". And of Phillip Isabella had much to say too: "He's like a cosmtic surgeon for your face. Your face has a different personality for each one you're wearing.".
The theater and performance of fashion, and the way in which it disquised, dressed up and exploited different aspects of the personality that lay beneath the surface, went to the heart of the challenging image that Isabella represented. Often exploring the subject of her own appearance, she regularly expressed contradictory views, once describing her own face as "ugly. I know that's subjective, so perhaps i should stay instead that I m striking. My face is like a Plantagenet portrait".
" Fashion is a vampiric thing. It's the hoover on your brain. That's why i wore hats, to keep everyone away from me".
And indeed the hats she wore did go beyond normal expectations, bringing to life visions of extraordinary and unrxpected detail, whether it was a jewelencrusted lobster for Julien Macdonald's fashion show in 1998, or a Japanese garden complete with temples and trees for Alexander Mcqueen. But Treacy hat was not just to mask the face, or to turn it into something else. Isabella voiced more whimsical reasons to keep her head adorned : to prevent air kissing amongst all and sundry, and to provide something to be removed in the act of love making.
The fashion shows of spring 1996 were particularly pregnant with Isabella's realisation of the rotic macabre. While the hats in Phillip Treacy collection included a pheasant perched on the head, a phython that coiled around in implicit constriction and a hat that unzipped at the eye, Mcqueen was busy going all out with a storm of medieval gothic that was as outrageous as it was beautiful.
Set in the imposing Victorian church of Christchurch in Spitalfields, Mcqueen's collection was as notorious as any of his previews shows. Not only did Christchurch have personal historical significance for the designer and his faily, it also seemed to embody the strange glamour of the gothic in fashion that captured both his imagination and that of Isabella. Christchurch had a dangerous side. A historically conflicted place, it's architect Nicholas Hawksmoor had been characterized as having Satanic intentions in accounts by the East London mythologiser Iain Sinclair, and again later by Peter Ackroyd in the novel Hawksmoor. Mcqueen filled the church with imagery that fed into similar ideas. The runway was provocatively cross shaped and a skeleton sat in the front row, but against this backdrop there was a more fragile sensitivity at work: an archway of roses stood at the head of the runway, candles lined the windows, and the models themselves wore delicate creations such as bird claw earrings, antlers and masks, all complimented with Victorian footwear. At the end, Mcqueen received a standing ovation and two bouquets. One went to his mother, the other he gave to Isabella.
Churches and their intimate with relationship with death, had a particularl significance for Isabella. "When you are little church is the one place where your imagination can go crazy,because there is nothing to do and you' ve got to sit in this place. I think church does hepl me enormously, becaude death is a big thing, I m afraid for me." she once said.
It was McQueen who described Isabella as " a cross between a Billingsgate fishwife and Lucretia Borgia".
The relationship between the both transcended class and was born from it. McQueen, having grown up the son of an East End taxi driver, found himself in an enviroment where few others shared his background. Isabella had to deal with it the words of The New York Time, Blue blood , in her veins but a financially troubled and darkly bohemian family history. Both were operating in an enviroment that was awe of them yet often not sure to place them. Their shared outsider status and aesthetic tastes forged a strong creative bond between the two that was to give rise to McQueen's move to Gucci in 2000, a move that cemented his international career.
While the meeting with Tom Ford that led to McQueen's adoption by Gucci was in many ways the climax of their professional relationship, Isabella's support had already been long standing. As well as purchasing his degree show, which she paid for in monthly installments of 100 pounts, she allowed him to work in the basement of her house in Elizabeth Street, as Phillip had done, during the 1990s.
The deal with Gucci was a bittersweet one for Isabella. Having made the introduction between Ford and McQueen she was unable to assert her own value in the deal and received nothing. Her inability to clearly translate her talent for realising the potential of others was perhaps in part due to her ability to identify what a talent this actually was.
A defining feature of Isabella's presence, beyond her unfailingly eye catching appearance, was her ability to talk in disarmingly eloquent, often highly provocative soundbites. Her comments regularly managed to pack a lot into a small phrase. A seemingly glib remark often contained much more, atoungue in cheek satire of the fashion world and a profound comment on the human condition often occuring in a few words. "Being neurotic is bad for managing your life, but it keeps you thin. That's why I m a size eight." she had once said.
Another soundbite summed up her approach to life and work "If i had my time again, perhaps id try instant gratification. I 've alaways gone for seduction ".
Her fascination with eroticism was well published, particularly because she tenede to feed startlingly sexual remarks to an expectant press, but she also injected her sense of sexuality into her styling work. In one such incident in 2003, she organized a shoot for Tatler that would push the boundaries of seduction and verge on the instant gratification she had hinted at.
An Isabella Blow shoot was always an event. During the first Gulf War, photographer and long time collaborator Donald McPherson seized a spontaneous opprtunity to photograph her on the Kuwaiti border. The result, a vision of Isabella triumphantly dressed in Treacy mask and flying cape, captured the raw power that her image could conjure. In the later stages of her career, she flew out to New Delhi in atypically extreme one person attempt to harness the potential of Indian fashion. Recalling the moment, Leon St Amour remembers being called up to fly out and join her. On arriving in his hotel room he turned on the television and there she was, taking over the news channels, declaring her mission to save the Indian fashion industry.
Such stories may illustrate that Isabella's performance may have been, as Anna Wintour has suggested, about "making her job into an event", but when she worked on shoots it was about much more. While styling for photographer and Cannes award winning film director Sean Ellis in the 1990s, their collaboration led to images that were beautiful, sometimes brutal, and typically epic in scale. In one photograph from a shoot titled Battle, Alexander McQueen stands, reflective and in full armour, as the bleak reality of the battlefield unfolds around him. It is an image evoative of the medieval gothic that permeated Isabella's life, right up until her very last photo shoot for Vanity Fair just days before her suicide. Photographed inside Battersea Arts Center, it featured Isabella dressed and posing regally, also in full body armour. Famously, Hilles, the home she shared with Detmar, was richly dressed in medieval iconography, and it seemed right that her final moment in the spotlight was captured as part of a medieval fantasy she had nurtured and loved.
Isabella was not just a figure of the fashion world. As she proved from the very beginning of her career in New York, passing time with Warhol and Basquiat, her passion for art was strong. It not only featured in her language and in her photo shoots, with their explicit nods to moments and moods in art history, but it featured in her everyday lige too. Attracted, perhaps unsurprisingly, to the black humour of artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster, she commissioned a portrait of herself, which the pair then produced using an unusual combination of dead animals including a rattlesnake, a raven, several crows, a rook, a robin and a rat. The grotesque concoction, balanced on a pole like a severed head, threw the most startling shadow on the wall of Isabella's profile in all its subtle detail and character. The piece has now entered the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. Another portrait, by the artist Tracey Emin, sculpted Isabella into a conflicted network of slender, angular beams. An abstract piece, it once again exposed the fragile skeleton that dweilt between Isabella's extrovert character.
Isabella herself embraced the concept of suicide in the manner of romantic tragedy, repeatedly failing to end her life through re enactemnts of famous suicides such as that of writer Virginia Woolf. Even in her final days in hospital, she would stubbornly, and uncomfortably, dress herself in a silver 1930s lamedress. The performance never ended even as the weedkiller she had ultimately resoretd to began to take effect. And, true to her memory, the show continued at the funeral. A philip Treacy hat atop a striking bust, and the pheasant hat she had always wanted to be buried with was placed in her coffin. The only thing missing, Phillip said subsequently, was a packet of B&H.
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