This Blows

I was shocked to find out that Isabella Blow died 2 weeks ago. I have been reading a lot about her life and death recently. She was such an amazing eccentric. I'm sad that she's gone. In memory of her here's a little about her life.

The eldest child of Major Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton, 12th Bt, a military officer, and his second wife, Helen Mary Shore, a barrister, she was born in London in 1958. Grandfather (Sir Jock Delves Broughton) who was tried and acquitted of an infamous murder in Kenya in the 1940s. Blow witnessed the drowning death of her young brother when she was only four. As she told Tamsin Blanchard of The Observer in 2002, "I've done the most peculiar jobs. I was working in a scone shop for years, selling apricot-studded scones. I was a cleaner in London for two years. I wore a handkerchief with knots on the side, and my cousin saw me in the post office and said, What are you doing? I said, What do you think I look like I'm doing? I'm a cleaner!" According to the Blanchard interview, Blow was disinherited by her father in 1994 and received only ₤5,000 of his reported ₤7 million fortune.

Blow moved to New York City in 1979 to study Ancient Chinese Art at Columbia University. A year later, she left the Art History program at Columbia, moved to Texas, and worked for Guy Laroche. In 1981, she married her first husband, Nicholas Taylor (whom she divorced in 1986), and was introduced to the then fashion director of the US edition of Vogue, Anna Wintour. She was hired initially as Wintour's assistant, but it was not long before she was assisting Andre Leon Talley, now the USA Vogue's editor-at-large. While working in New York, she befriended Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 1986, she returned to London and worked for Michael Roberts, then Fashion Director of Tatler and the Sunday Times Style magazine. In 1989, she married her second husband, art dealer Detmar Blow, in Gloucester Cathedral; he is a grandson (and namesake) of the society architect, the late Detmar Blow. Philip Treacy designed the bride's wedding headdress and a now-famous fashion relationship was forged. Blow established Treacy in her mother-in-law's basement flat, where he worked on his collections for two years. Blow eventually appeared, wearing a Treacy hat, in the 2004 Wes Anderson film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. According to an interview with Tamsin Blanchard, Blow declared that she wore extravagant hats for a practical reason: "to keep everyone away from me. They say, Oh, can I kiss you? I say, No, thank you very much. That's why I've worn the hat. Goodbye. I don't want to be kissed by all and sundry. I want to be kissed by the people I love." She discovered Alexander McQueen and purchased his entire graduate collection for ₤5,000, paying it off in weekly ₤100 installments. Spotting Sophie Dahl, Isabella described Dahl as "a blow up doll with brains" and launched the model's career. In 2002, she became the subject of an exhibition entitled When Philip met Isabella, featuring sketches and photographs of her wearing Treacy's hat designs.

Toward the end of her life, Blow had become seriously depressed and reportedly was anguished over her inability to "find a home in a world she influenced", wrote Cathy Horyn of The New York Times on 10 May 2007. As one of Isabella's friends, Daphne Guinness, told Horyn, "She was upset that [Alexander] McQueen didn't take her along when he sold his brand to Gucci. Once the deals started happening, she fell by the wayside. Everybody else got contracts, and she got a free dress". According to a 2002 interview with Tamsin Blanchard, it was Blow who brokered the deal in which Gucci purchased McQueen's label. Other pressures on her fragile psyche were money problems and infertility; according to an article in the Daily Mail, Blow and her husband had unsuccessfully tried in vitro fertilization eight times. "We were like a pair of exotic fruits that could not breed when placed together", she said.

Following a row with her mother-in-law over which member of the family would inherit Hilles, Isabella and Detmar Blow separated — Detmar went on to have an affair with the bisexual novelist Stephanie Theobald, while Isabella entered into a liaison with a gondolier she met in Venice — but they reconciled 18 months later. In 2006, again according to The New York Times, Blow attempted suicide twice, once by jumping from the Hammersmith Flyover, which resulted in her breaking both legs. After this, the paper noted, the fashion icon "became more and more remote, convinced that she would end up as a bag lady." On 6 May 2007, during a weekend house party at her husband's ancestral home, Hilles, near Stroud, Gloucestershire, where the guests included Treacy and his life partner, Stefan Bartlett, Blow announced that she was going shopping. Instead, she later was discovered in a state of distress by one of her younger sisters and was taken to Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, where Blow told the doctor that she had drunk the weedkiller Paraquat. She died at the hospital two days later. The London Times reported on 9 May 2007 the details of Blow's death and noted that her husband's father had also used Paraquat to commit suicide. She was buried from Gloucester Cathedral on 15 May 2007. Her coffin, made of willow, was surmounted by one of her Philip Treacy hats instead of a floral tribute.