Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow: Burning Down The House, 1996, London. Copyright David LaChapelle Studio, Inc.
Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow: Burning Down The House, 1996, London. Copyright David LaChapelle Studio, Inc.
The exhibition Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! opens in London this week, charting the life and wardrobe of one of contemporary fashion’s most extraordinary and influential characters. Alexander Fury unpicks her influence and legacy.
First of all, a disclaimer. I never met Isabella Blow. When she committed suicide in 2007, I was a paper-pushing underling scraping my way into shows. Our professional paths never crossed. Nevertheless, it feels like she's always been part of my consciousness - certainly my fashion consciousness.
It's the same for many: "The Sunday Times Style was a bible to me!" declared J.W. Anderson when I interviewed him back in September, recalling the period when Blow acted as fashion director for the magazine.
I shared those feelings as a fledgling but ardent fashion fan. I still have a 1996 issue featuring Blow herself on the cover in a jet-embroidered Alexander McQueen jacket and Philip Treacy saucer hat. In 1998, I won a Royal Mail letter-writing competition (well, third prize) by penning a missive to the person I admired most. Who else could it be but Isabella Blow?
Blow is a woman to admire. Why? Well, contrary to popular belief, not because of the way she dressed, but because she operated outside the sycophantic constraints of fashion. Fashion wasn't a living, it was her reason for living.
"The fashion industry needs flamboyant, passionate people in it who love fashion and want to make fashion - they want to live it and they see it as sort of self-expression," says photographer Nick Knight. He worked with Blow and photographed her wardrobe for the catalogue to accompany the forthcoming exhibition, Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! which opens in London today.
Blow was a tireless, fearless, uninhibited champion of fashion - of her fashion. She spotted some of the finest Britain has ever produced - McQueen, Treacy, the models Sophie Dahl and Honor Fraser, a young Welsh knitwear designer called Julien Macdonald, whom she carried to Karl Lagerfeld's door at Chanel. "I don't like crap. I like craftsmanship," she once emphatically declared. That was her clarion call.
Philip Treacy hat, c.2004, Louis Vuitton coat, A/W 2004. Wunderkind dress, S/S 2006. Worn to 'The Phantom of the Opera' premiere, 6 Dec 2004. Model, Liberty Ross/Storm Models.Photo/Nick Knight.
But Blow didn't want to silence you with a look; she wanted to provoke. She hounded, hustled and bullied to further the careers of those she believed in, namely McQueen and Treacy. Blow spotted them both as students, famously buying McQueen's entire MA collection.
He delivered the pieces in bin liners and she paid in cash instalments, £100 ($194) at a time. Still a Royal College of Art student, Treacy made Blow's head-dress for her marriage to art dealer Detmar Blow in 1989. She fostered their talent, in every sense of the word. Blow opened up her homes to them: during the early 90s, she was literally housing the designers at her place in Belgravia.
The exhibition, however, isn't about McQueen, nor Treacy, although as it consists of pieces drawn from Blow's extensive wardrobe, both designers feature heavily. Rather, as the name suggests, it's all about Blow. I wasn't convinced of that title to begin with - Blow was never about fashion so much as style, pitching up in seasons-old frocks, possibly trailing a piece of Renaissance armour for good measure.
Then a friend of hers pointed out that it was reminiscent of Pussy Galore, which Isabella would have adored. Blow had a raunchy sense of humour, like a seaside postcard. Author and journalist Camilla Morton recalls her, exclaiming, "Your mouth is a hole. And what do men put in your mouth? I think lipstick can maybe encourage someone to do that," in the middle of an interview ostensibly devoted to cosmetics.
Hat - Philip Treacy, S/S 2003. Cut out mouths pop art hat, paper, silk and wire. Dress - Chalayan, S/S 1999. Cream folded pleat dress, silk. Model / Xiao Wen Ju at IMG. Photo / Nick Knight.
"I think that she had a sort of 20s and 30s aristocratic disdain for the concept of money," declares Nicholas Coleridge, president of Conde Nast International - Isabella's erstwhile boss. "And that, of course, was violently at odds with the concept of budgets within which magazines, as you know, tend to work. I think that she actually thought it was slightly demeaning to constrain your work in any way to the confines of a budget."
He relates an infamous story of Blow missing a train from Liverpool during a shoot for Tatler. "So she hailed a taxi in the street and she asked it to take her to London. And it cost something like £1200." He roars with laughter.
Blow was on the masthead, at various points and in various positions, of Conde Nast's Vogue and Tatler, as well as Sunday Times Style. She filled her shoots with the same clothes she wore out every day, a walking billboard - or breathing editorial - for whatever designer she was eulogising at that particular point.
"She always wore what she was about to photograph," said Jeremy Langmead, then editor of Style, recalling Blow dining in the News International canteen sporting fur shoulder-pads with antlers by the then-unknown American designer Jeremy Scott (another of her success stories; he's just been appointed creative director of Moschino).
Burka - Undercover by Jun Takahashi, S/S 2003. Shocking pink sheer burka. Worn to Christian Dior, Haute Couture S/S 2003, Paris, January 2003. Model / Alexia Wight. Photo/ Nick Knight.
"I think she was very good at certain epic, very memorable shoots like the work with David LaChapelle, who I always thought was a big influence on her styling. These big, Baroque shoots," says Coleridge fondly. "She was capable of doing bad shoots as well as good shoots, as you know. But I don't think anyone ever tried to rein in her fantasies, ever. I think we all rather loved her fantasy pictures."
Fantasy was really what Blow dealt in, rather than fashion. But, as Nicholas Coleridge says, "Behind the fantasy beauty of her world, there was hurt and disappointment a lot of the time . . . I think she found a lot of disappointments in the world. Don't you?"
Knight states: "The real physical meeting of Isabella was stronger than most images she produced." That's a fleeting, ephemeral thing, a fantasy, rather than the magazine images printed on glossy paper. It's a quality Knight's catalogue images manage to capture - ghosts of Blow's wardrobe past, models attired in outfits recreated exactly as she wore them.
The exhibition does the same. Both are a testament to her styling skills, even if the styling, in this case, was on herself. Knight's images are lush, elegiac. They blow you away. No pun intended.
It may not have paid the bills, but the fantasy is what has endured. It's Isabella Blow's legacy. She was a supreme fashion fantasist. "We didn't want it to be mundane," states Jeremy Langmead of his tenure with Blow. "Life is mundane." That's what made me love her as a child. And it's why I still love her today.
