I WILL NEVER FORGET MY FIRST encounter with Isabella Blow. I had arrived at Vogue House - the hallowed London headquarters of Conde Nast Publications - fresh from the provinces and dressed in my best imitation Dior Homme for an internship interview at Vogue. I got in the lift and found myself standing in silence next to her. I self-consciously clocked her phenomenal get-up - a severe black suit made of crows' feathers, perilous Manolos and a glittering scarlet skull cap with a solitary feather jutting skywards. What chance did I have of breaking into this world of haute couture, high heels and even higher hats? Then she caught me staring at her, gave me a typically filthy wink and remarked: 'Sexy cardi, darling.' I got the internship.
For more than a decade, Blow reigned over the international fashion world from her formidable front-row seat, peaking beneath the veils that so often covered her face to scour for the new blood she so craved. One journalist compared her search for new talent to 'a hunter collecting trophies. Instead of hanging their heads on her castle wall, their clothes are her rewards.' She likened herself to a pig sniffing out truffles. Whatever the simile, Blow had superb fashion antennae and discovered, among others, designers Alexander McQueen and Philip Treacy, models Sophie Dahl and Stella Tennant and photographer David LaChapelle. 'No one had an eye like Issie,' Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue told The New York Times. 'The more corporate of us look at everything differently than someone like her, so whenever I got that phone call that Issie said I should see something, I would go.'
The newspapers have made much of Blow's suicide through drinking weedkiller, the previous attempts to end her life, her deep depressions and her growing disillusionment with an industry she saw as being taken over by corporate 'money men'. Her dark intentions were no secret, but even in her final hours fashion was paramount: she insisted on wearing a silver lame 1930s bias-cut gown in her hospital bed. The touching image of her coffin entering Gloucester Cathedral (where she had married her husband of almost 20 years, Detmar Blow), topped with a raft of roses and her favourite Philip Treacy hat, was hard to reconcile with the larger-than-life, outspoken persona she carved out for herself (she never did take to the term 'eccentric', being too level headed for it).
'You know what it is, darling?' she once told me, leaning in close enough that I could smell the Fracas perfume she so liberally applied to her ample, visible bosom. 'You need to be a bloody good performance artist. You need to go out there and put a rhino skin on.' It was a thick skin that had served her well in the past. As a child she watched her infant brother drown, followed by her mother's desertion of her and her two younger sisters. Later in life she suffered a cruel disinheritance, and her inability to have children was a constant thorn in her side.
Instead, she turned her clothes into her babies. 'Severity with a twist,' was how she described her personal style. Sightings of Blow in and around Vogue House were pure visual intoxication. Sitting in the mundane little cafe there, sipping from a paper cup, she looked like a curious, exotic peacock in her ice-blue Alexander McQueen corseted skirt suit with its bursting bustle and her trademark red lipstick (she collaborated with M.A.C. to create her own shade).
Blow never owned a pair of jeans. Her front-row ensembles were carefully co-ordinated creations; during fashion weeks, she created mood boards for what she would wear each day. 'One must, it's the only way to make it bearable,' she told me in her upper-class English drawl.