Isabella Blow's style was uncompromising and her expenses legendary. Even in the world of fashion, which celebrates flamboyance, she was a true original. Her death last week means the loss of a style icon.
Isabella Blow had many friends in the fashion industry, but it's safe to say that they were unlikely to be the people signing off her monthly expenses. Like many things about this perfectly flamboyant creature, her disbursements were infamous.
At The Sunday Times, where she worked as fashion director in
the late 1990s, the joke was that Blow took a cab to the bathroom every morning, although she is reported to have later discovered public transport and enjoyed using it immensely.
Also while at that paper, it was not unknown for Blow to travel all the way to Russia, for example, in search of the perfect pair of gloves for a particular picture.
If, upon her return, she still wasn't sure these were quite right, they would duly be sent backwards and forwards by courier, ad infinitum, tweaked a little here, entirely remade there - only to be rejected on the day of the shoot in question because, well, they simply weren't a suitable colour.
And, in Blow's highly sensitised world, an even remotely unsuitable colour simply wouldn't do.
In such matters - as in so many things - there was something profoundly anachronistic about this highly contrived, diminutive woman who was happy to hobble about in shoes that resembled nothing more than cardboard boxes should she believe their creator to be an artist.
Isabella Blow made a career out of never - repeat never - wearing trainers, or indeed jeans, and couldn't understand why anyone else working in fashion was lazy enough to do so.
She would dutifully step out in the Dutch designers Viktor & Rolf's Atomic Bomb collection, say, based entirely on a mushroom cloud, despite the fact that even the then almost entirely unknown designers never intended it to go into production.
In retrospect, it's a miracle she ever made it through the door in her outfit the size of the proverbial back of a bus and covered with oversized pompoms to boot.
"It's by Viktor & Rolf," she patiently told the endless stream of photographers and groupies who followed her everywhere she went during the circus that is the twice-yearly international fashion collections, thereby ensuring that the designers' names were permanently inscribed on the map.
Then there was the Joan of Arc moment, complete with dragging pewter chain that she wore to dinner chez Karl Lagerfeld, where, by all accounts, it wreaked merry havoc with his ivory carpets.
Most of all, Blow was famed for wearing the sculptural creations of the milliner Philip Treacy - these served both to hide her face (which she considered ugly) and to forestall the requisite (and in her case largely unwanted) fashion of air-kissing - and the hourglass, highly sexualised designs of Alexander McQueen.
Blow supported both Treacy and McQueen (McQueen described her as "a cross between a Billingsgate fishwife and Lucretia Borgia") early in their respective careers, putting them up in her flat in Pimlico.
Prior to that, she had bought McQueen's entire degree collection for the princely sum of £5000 and wore it everywhere, immediately establishing him as the designer name to see and be seen in.
In 2002, an exhibition entitled When Philip Met Isabella at London's Design Museum celebrated the collaboration with the milliner. Blow was still working with Treacy on developing the show at the time of her death. It opens in St Petersburg later this month.
In 1979, aged 20, Blow moved to New York to study ancient Chinese art at Columbia University, sharing a room with the similarly blue-blooded Dynasty beauty Catherine Oxenberg.
Her break into fashion came two years later, when she was introduced to the then fashion director of American Vogue, Anna Wintour, by Bryan and Lucy Ferry.
Blow was hired as Wintour's assistant and later promoted to organise fashion shoots under Andre Leon Talley, Vogue's editor-at-large to this day.
"In a world that's largely driven by corporate culture, she was a joy to have," Wintour said of her late colleague last week. "She was not too good at getting to the office before 11am, but then she would arrive dressed as a maharajah or an Edith Sitwell figure ... she made life much more interesting."
Small wonder, then, that from then on, Blow's career gathered momentum. By the mid-1980s, she found herself back in London working as assistant to Michael Roberts, both at Tatler - then presided over by the brilliant Mark Boxer - and The Sunday Times.
She was a great stylist. True, her work was strictly autobiographical, depicting grand, gothic, sexually ambiguous heroes and heroines in equally grand, gothic clothing, and often with grand, crumbling gothic mansions as homes.
But in the advertising-fuelled medium that much contemporary fashion photography has become, such heartfelt content was always a breath of fresh air.
Anyone who has ever sat next to Blow at a show will testify to the fact that she lived and breathed fashion, and even after 20 years working in the industry, she was barely able to contain herself at shows, bouncing in her seat in a crinoline skirt ("Oh God, I forgot to wear knickers," she once wailed in my direction) and whooping and cheering when anything that took her fancy, while all around her remained po-faced.
As is so often the case, though, any exuberance served, at least in part, as a foil to a rather more fragile heart. If her appearance was fierce, the rapacious exterior functioned not only as a joyful expression of individuality but also as a protective layer.
She felt betrayed by at least some of those she had supported and, although she was still working as a fashion editor at Tatler, her profile was nowhere near as high as it had once been. Michael Roberts summed up Isabella's contribution to the world beautifully. "She was like an exotic bird," he said. "Issy was living rather like Diana Vreeland, the legendary fashion editor of the Fifties. She seemed to be trying to translate the styles of the Fifties and Sixties to modern life in a dull office in Hanover Square. At times, it could be difficult for her. Life tramples on people like that."
- INDEPENDENT
