Any aristocratic British clan worth their double-barreled name has a motto, and the family of Isabella Blow, nee Isabella Delves Broughton, is no exception. The motto, dating from the 13th century, is Haud Muto Factum, ‘Nothing happens by being mute.’ It’s a suitable sentiment for Blow, a woman who, until her death in 2007, was known for her extreme opinions and bold fashion choices. Although she was dark wit, Blow is not thought of for anything that came out of her crimson-stained lips. Rather, she’s best remembered for what she put on her head.
English women, not known for their ostentatious dressing, save their flamboyance for their hats. But on Blow, millinery became an art form. Lobsters, orchids, antlers, feathers twisted to spell her name–Blow’s hats transported you to another world. She had different titles throughout her career (assistant, editor, designer’s muse) but her greatest position was being herself, a personification of fashion’s beautiful, erotic, unsettling dreams.
This week, the Isabella Blow Foundation, along with Central Saint Martins, announced that highlights from Blow’s personal collection of clothing and accessories would be put on display for the first time. Titled Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! the exhibit will feature more than 100 pieces and will open at London’s Somerset House in November. Given the popularity of fashion exhibitions since the groundbreaking Alexander McQueen show at the Met, I wouldn’t be surprised if the show went international.
“Isabella…made our world more vivid, trailing color with every pace she took,” said beer heiress Daphne Guinness. “It is a sorrier place for her absence.” After Blow’s death, Guinness bought all of her clothes, which have sat in storage for years. “I do believe that in choosing to exhibit them we’ve done the right thing – and that it is what she would have wanted. I am doing this in memory of a dear friend, in the hope that her legacy may continue to aid and inspire generations of designers to come.”
Blow discovered and nurtured McQueen and Philip Treacy, but the collection will also include pieces by Jeremy Scott, Viktor & Rolf, Julien Macdonald, Escada, Fendi, Prada, and Marni. Even in death, Blow’s impeccable eye and eccentric taste continue to promote the fashion industry–an industry that arguably abandoned her later in life.
The Delves Broughton family tree includes lords, ladies and one supposed cannibal, Isabella’s grandmother. “She wasn’t strictly a cannibal,” Blow told The Guardian in 2002. “She was in Papua New Guinea and she had some dinner and she said, ‘God, that was delicious. What was it? It’s so sweet!’ And they admitted it was a poor local tribesman who had been grilled up. That was in the 30’s and she didn’t do it knowingly. In the back of Who’s Who, where people have their pastimes, she just put ‘once a cannibal.’”
But the family wasn’t all romantic world travelling and accidentally eating human flesh. The Delves Broughton witnessed more than their fair share of tragedy. Blow’s grandfather was accused of murdering his wife’s lover. Although he was found not guilty, he later committed suicide. Her brother drowned at the age of two in the family swimming pool, which lead eventually to the dissolution of her parents’ marriage. Her mother bid goodbye to her two daughters with a formal handshake and her father, a military officer, was expectedly cold. When he died in 1994, he disinherited Isabella.
Despite being ‘to the manor born,’ Blow always had to work. “I’ve done the most peculiar jobs,” she told The Guardian. “I was working in a scone shop for years, selling apricot-studded scones. I was a cleaner in London for two years. I wore a handkerchief with knots on the side, and my cousin saw me in the post office and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘What do you think I look like I’m doing? I’m a cleaner!'”
Moving to New York just in time to catch the shimmering end of the 1970’s, Blow made friends with Andy Warhol and Jean-Michael Basquiat, got married (and divorced), and was hired by Vogue to be assistant to the newly-installed Anna Wintour. Instead of writing a tell-all book of gripes and gossip, after moving back to England she became the fashion editor at Tatler and then the Sunday Times Style section.
For her wedding to art dealer Detmar Hamilton Blow, Isabella wore a hat designed by Philip Treacy. Soon after, she installed him in her London flat where he could work on his creations. Blow not only ‘discovered’ Treacy, but discovered her life’s work–nurturing emerging talents. She bought Alexander McQueen’s entire graduate collection, paid for in weekly installments. She also promoted models Stella Tennant and Sophie Dahl, who she described as a blow-up doll come to life.
While Blow loved clothes, her heart was in her hats. I always picture Isabella during her cameo appearance in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Wearing a feathered fascinator, she consoles Bill Murray’s character after a muted response to his film from an audience of black-tie Italian cinephiles. “I don’t think they really got it,” she says. I think Blow and her headgear were similarly misunderstood. People thought she was doing whimsy. In reality, she put more of herself on display than we realized.
“It’s not a mad hatter’s tea party,” she once explained. “It’s meant to be a sensual, erotic display… The hat is a means to an end, a marriage contract. It’s a sensual thing— the idea of catching somebody like a spider in a web. It’s the old-fashioned cock-and-hen story, the mating dance. Men love hats. They love it because it’s something they have to take off in order to fuck you. Anyone can wear a hat.”
But if hats were meant to bring people closer, Blow also wore them to push them back. She admitted to using hats, “to keep everyone away from me. They say, ‘Oh, can I kiss you?’ I say, ‘No, thank you very much.’ That’s why I’ve worn the hat. I don’t want to be kissed by all and sundry.”
Blow always had trouble with money, and in later years complained openly that she had not been reimbursed enough for helping everyone that she did. Another aristocratic tradition–only those born with money are confident enough to grumble about the lack of it. She appeared particularly hurt Blow described herself to Jeanne Beker as a mother to the fashion industry, but ominously added, “the milk’s running dry.”
It was a telling metaphor. Blow and her husband were unable to have children. “We were like a pair of exotic fruits who could not breed when placed together,” she said. Detmar had an affair and Isabella ran off with a Venetian gondolier. Although the couple reunited, Blow was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and later cancer. Her depression increased dramatically in her last year of life and she attempted suicide with sleeping pills, horse tranquilizers, and jumping off London’s Hammersmith flyover. She eventually succeeded in killing herself at a country house of a friend. She told the assembled guests she was going shopping. She was 48.
You could make the argument that Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! is exploitative, one last example of the industry using her only when it sees fit. But she was a part of that industry as well and chose the life she had even if, as she once said, it was a lonely one. I agree with Guinness that Isabella would have liked her clothes on display. They’re no good sitting in storage, collecting dust. She dressed for other people as much as she did for herself. The Isabella Blow Foundation, while focused on supporting aspiring art and fashion students, is also dedicated to funding research into depression and mental health. My hope for the exhibit, along with Blow’s legacy overall, is that fashion followers make a better effort to understand the workings of the mind, not just what sits on top of it.
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Max Mosher writes about style for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @max_mosher_.
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