Isabella Blow, fashion Svengali to many, Dies

For more on Isabella Blow, read the entire article at The New York Times.

Isabella Blow, a British fashion editor, aristocrat and aesthete whose gift for identifying and promoting new talent was occasionally overshadowed by her own Surrealist plumage, died yesterday in Gloucestershire, England. She was 48.

Her death, at a hospital, was reported by Geordie Greig, the editor in chief of Tatler, the British magazine where Ms. Blow was fashion director. No cause was given.

Among Ms. Blow’s many discoveries were the designers Alexander McQueen (she purchased his entire first collection), the Dior designer John Galliano and Jun Takahashi, the eccentric creator behind the label
Undercover.

She was credited with discovering the models Stella Tennant and Sophie Dahl, whom she once characterized as a “blowup doll with brains.” And though “muse” may be a hackneyed term, it well served Ms. Blow’s lifelong relationship to the global guild of hatters, whom she challenged constantly to design something too mad for her to wear.

Both the couture milliners Stephen Jones and Philip Treacy, a baker’s son whose fashion confections are favored by the British royals, were also Ms. Blow’s finds.

“Isabella was this amazing bright light in a world of increasingly corporate culture,” said Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, who hired Ms. Blow in the early 1980s to work as her assistant at British Vogue.

Ms. Blow became renowned for her sartorial daring. On a given day at the office, Ms. Wintour said, Ms. Blow might turn up dressed as a Greek goddess, Joan of Arc or an Indian maharani. During the ready-to-wear shows in New York, Milan and Paris, she might change clothes as often as seven times a day. She delighted in flouting convention and personal comfort, appearing in one-legged trouser suits, outfits of chain mail or a Japanese designer’s version of a burqa.

“She was aristocratic, in the old bohemian sense of anything is possible, yet she could talk about fashion with complete rigor in terms of silhouette, shape and historical context,” said Mr. Greig, the editor of Tatler. “She was an academic with a punk rocker’s anarchic sense.”