SHOCK - Isabella Blow RIP

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I am so shocked to have just found out that Isabella Blow died on Sunday!

I know she had struggled with depression, but hadnt known she was ill. I met her recently when she exhibited her show 'when philip met isabella'., in the Museum/Art gallery where I work...we were told she wouldnt be attending but she surprised us all and arrived at short notice. Such a shame, she was 48.

I found out online, havent heard anything until I just read my online broadsheet and followed on to Vogue for this...

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THE TIMES OBITUARY

ISABELLA BLOW REMEMBERED

ISABELLA BLOW's husband Detmar confirmed this morning that the 48-year-old fashion guru died in the early hours of Sunday morning at the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital. The news has shocked the international fashion world, for whom Isabella has been a bastion, credited with the discovery of such successful figures as Alexander McQueen, Philip Treacy, Sophie Dahl and Stella Tennant. "She was a ray of sunshine," said Detmar, of the woman he proposed to just 16 days after meeting her at a wedding in 1988 before marrying her the following year. "She was a beautiful, brave woman; indefatigable, courageous and brilliantly intellectual." Blow, who recently underwent surgery to remove a tumour and had also suffered severe depression, had been confined to hospital for some time but her husband said he had still been hopeful of a recovery. "She was original, impactful, generous-minded and spotted some of the greatest talents," said Geordie Greig, editor of Tatler magazine for which Blow was still working as a contributing editor. "She was the most intelligent and creative person in fashion. In many ways she was the British queen of fashion. She was intoxicating. You could never get enough of her. She was a free spirit." Philip Treacy, whose hats Isabella was rarely seen without, also paid tribute from the Blow country home this morning: "She was a great champion of young people," he said. "She came from the establishment but she was a punk at heart. Her love was talent, rather than money. Her ethos was beauty and elegance. And her encouragement was rare." (May 8 2007, AM)
 
I was so shocked and sad to hear of her death.

What a person to look up to-- Thank you for posting that piece Sara.
 
Sara - I was so shocked to hear of Isabella's death. She was so bouncy and lovely at the exhibition and had time for a chat with everyone. Philip will miss her, as will everybody else in the fashion world. But let this be a reminder to all of us - live life to the full and be sweet and caring to all of our friends and family. We never know what is around the corner.

Margaret
 
l was hoping you would drop by Margaret..l thought of you yesterday when l heard, knew you'd be shocked also. I totally agree with your sentiments...hit me as we are the same age and share some similar histories.

I shall have a look at my pics and insert a slide show, if they look good enough...

sara x
 
Looking forward to the slide show Sara. We were in the middle of nowhere until yesterday and so I didn't get a paper - reading your post was the first I knew. Although there is an article which you have probably read today - she was a very brave lady.

Live life and see you in the Autumn.

Margaret
 
I saw the obit on the BBC site and didn't read it because I will truthfully claim ignorance regarding her work. :BAGUSE: :BAGUSE:

BUT, now that I see her image, YES, I do recognise her!

Are they saying she died from cancer or some depression related "thing?"

or both? - as can happen. Like my mom ..... :(

Janine
 
Janine,

While it doesn't give specific details about the cause of death (there's no mention of cancer) I think the obit that appeared in the NY Times is exceptionally illuminating.


Isabella Blow, Flamboyant Discoverer of Fashion Talent, Dies at 48

By GUY TREBAY
Published: May 8, 2007


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.”

Isabella Delves Broughton was born in 1958 to Helen Shore and Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton. She was educated at the Heathfield School and a secretarial academy and, briefly in the late 1970s, at Columbia University.

She held jobs variously as a clerk at a scone shop, a housemaid, a fashion assistant, the fashion director at The Sunday Times’s Style magazine and a consultant for DuPont Lycra, Lacoste and Swarovski crystals. With her husband, the art dealer Detmar Blow, she was a major promoter of new British art.

Ms. Blow descended from a family with a 34,000-acre estate, a 14th-century castle in Cheshire and a Latin motto whose translation she seems to have absorbed in her blood: “Nothing Happens by Being Mute.”

When gambling debts forced Ms. Blow’s grandfather, Sir Jock Delves Broughton, to part with his estates in the 1920s, he immigrated to Kenya and joined the Happy Valley set of alcoholic, aristocratic semi-exiles. There he was accused of the shooting death of the handsome and philandering Lord Erroll. Although tried and acquitted, he killed himself soon after the trial.

Tragedy and depression were recurrent themes in Ms. Blow’s life, friends and colleagues said. She was hospitalized last year with serious injuries resulting from what the press described as a fall. To her friends, Ms. Blow described the episode forthrightly, saying she had leaped onto a busy highway from an overpass.

“Thoughts of suicide were a big part of her existence and her persona,” said the designer Zac Posen. But so was her ambition “to better people’s lives by exposing them to creativity,” he said.

This was by no means an ambition whose expression Ms. Blow reserved for the style cognoscenti. “I have a vivid memory of Isabella on the moors at Hilles,” said Hamish Bowles, the European editor at large at Vogue, referring to an Arts & Crafts house in Gloucestershire, England, designed in 1913 by the architect grandfather of Ms. Blow’s husband.

For a meeting with the family’s land manager there, Ms. Blow selected from her closet a pair of violet satin, high-heeled Manolo Blahniks, a coat made from brilliantly colored opaque plastic bags, and a Stephen Jones hat of cock feathers curled to resemble question marks.

“In static, the coat just hung down in limp folds,” Mr. Bowles said. As its wearer moved, however, the bags inflated, as if some gorgeous, alien apparition had landed in a muddy field.

Mr. Bowles said: “This was for a meeting with a man on a tractor. She thought it was absolutely appropriate and picturesque, and that it would catch the breeze on the hills to spectacular effect.”


Carolyn
 
“In static, the coat just hung down in limp folds,” Mr. Bowles said. As its wearer moved, however, the bags inflated, as if some gorgeous, alien apparition had landed in a muddy field.

Mr. Bowles said: “This was for a meeting with a man on a tractor. She thought it was absolutely appropriate and picturesque, and that it would catch the breeze on the hills to spectacular effect.”
Click to expand...

Thank you for that great piece Carolyn, it really makes me want to smile and cry at the same time!
 
That was a brilliant obit you found Carolyn - can you imagine anyone meeting a man on a tractor in a field in England in that get-up?
Have sent it on to my friend in Northumberland who also went to the exhibition in Carlise which Sara helped to organise (very successfully). Thanks for posting it.

Margaret Chelsealace
 
That's quite an obit about a very beyond-unique person.

But, to me, "bi-polar disorder" pretty much screams out from the page.

The ecentricities - to say the least - beyond just being creative, the frequent depressions, the abrupt suicide attempt(s?), and the similar erratic behaviour of some family members - as it runs in families.

Gambling away a family fortune, alcoholism, MURDER, and the suicide.

Whether the cancer actually killed her or not, she was very much a classic (and classy) manic depressive.

Does anyone else see this?

Janine
 
well yes, depression is an awful disease and can kill you (indirectly) obviously, but Isabella died of an agressive ( as i understand) ovarian cancer diagnosed, just after xmas...

her depression manifested itself as manic during/after the period of breakup with Detmar, so it seems, but of course it wont just 'go away' after they were reconciled..it stays, perched on your shoulder, like a black cloud, waiting to pounce in another episode. Manic/bipolar is the crippling as is all depression, but it has its deeper demons.

Her personality and demeanour would have been her facade, as most depressive 'hide' behind an outgoing personality mnay friends and family arent aware of the 'dark side' and are so often surprised when they learn.
And also are very difficult to live with.
 
Very sad death, in either case. :sniff:

Regarding folk who are manic, there are various degrees of it, just like depression. You don't have to be getting messages from aliens through the fillings in your teeth to be a true manic.

By the way, I think this only happens with the metal fillings. I think if you make this claim and all your fillings are the newer white ones - THEN you REALLY have problems. :wacko:

The milder form of mania is hypo-mania - and it has nothing with being crazy about hypodermic needles.

Unless they SPEAK to you...... :o

Janine
 
after having gone into work today...the gossip is and someof the 'tabloids' are saying she poisoned herself....jeez...she has passed isnt that enough......!!??
 
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