By Sofia Guellaty
At the hospital, on her death bed, Isabella told the nurses, “Google me. I’m important.”
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This Wednesday, November 20th, Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! will open at London’s Somerset House, featuring over one hundred pieces from Isabella Blow’s personal clothing collection, as well as an auction of some of her most famous portraits. Backed by Daphne Guinness, an industry is set to pay homage to the late fashion icon, fashion editor, and muse. But this fete also comes as a bittersweet reminder of her tragic path.
Following conversations with her husband of 18 years, Detmar Hamilton Blow, and photographer and former housemate, Donald McPherson, Style.com/Arabia explores the dueling sides of the eccentric Isabella, along with some exclusive, previously unpublished photos and a short film made by McPherson.
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“Ultimately, it was up to Isabella whether she wanted to live or die. Issie lived a full life,” begins Isabella’s widower, Detmar. “She was high-strung and difficult. Everyone tried as much as they could. They loved her but she decided she didn’t want to get old. The fashion industry is a cruel one like that.”
Before fashion’s ubiquitous peacocking—before Anna Dello Russo’s swan hats, before Lady Gaga’s nest headpiece, and even before Daphne Guinness started wearing Couture by day—there was Isabella, the mercurial paradox. Joyful and suicidal; guarded and laid bare; generous and money-paranoid; motherly and childless.
“I considered her like a mother and [Alexander] McQueen would probably say the same thing,” explains Donald McPherson, as we sought to unpack what part of Isabella Blow, as we celebrate her today, was “the myth”. As with most mythology, the genesis starts with a troubled family story.
The eldest of four children, Isabella was born in 1958 in London to a military officer, Major Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton, and his second wife, Helen Mary Shore. Despite family wealth and a cheerful character, her life was one marked with tragedy. Her youngest brother drowned in the family’s swimming pool at the age of two; Isabella was five years old at the time. Decades later, she would tell Detmar that she always felt blamed for his death. In her teenage years, her parents separated and ultimately divorced. Isabella, away at school at the time, received notice of her parents’ impending divorce by mail. “Even in those days, that was pretty shocking from what I’d describe as, for better or worse, socialite-type parents. But hers were the worst—utterly terrible.” (Incidentally, Isabella’s paternal grandparents, also socialites, were portrayed in the 1982 book White Mischief and the 1987 film of the same name.)
Although the mental conditions existed from the outset, Detmar points to her parents’ divorce in her teenage years as the primary catalyst for Isabella’s lifelong battle with depression. “Just look at her family. It was genetic. But as soon as her parents get divorced, her life is shattered. And then it’s all darkness.”
Isabella moved to New York in 1979 to attend Columbia University, where she studied ancient Chinese art for a year before leaving the program. She landed an assistant job with Anna Wintour, at that time Fashion Director of American Vogue, and thus began her fashion career and underground social life, which had her mingling with the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. “Isabella wasn’t too good at getting to the office before 11am,” Wintour recalled in an interview shortly after Blow’s death. “But then she would arrive dressed as a maharajah or an Edith Sitwell figure. I don’t think she ever did my expenses, but she made life much more interesting.”
In 1981, Isabella married Nicholas Taylor, only to divorce him two years later. “She tried to have children but Nicholas didn’t want them. She was having abortions. It was all a bit crazy,” commented Detmar. “I think that Isabella just wanted to have a child to settle herself.” But with her own instability and insecurities, that might have proven to be even more problematic. Detmar continues, “She never saw herself as beautiful, which was tragic. She thought she had an amazing body but a hideous face. Isabella didn’t really have a mother who loved her or maybe she’d have been more stable. It was quite hard for her to love herself.”
