Isabella Blow Gets Two Biographies in 2010

fashionologie — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:37:29 PDT

>> Isabella Blow, discoverer of Stella Tennant, Sophie Dahl, Hussein Chalayan, Philip Treacy, Alexander McQueen - and muse to the latter two - passed away at 48 a little over two years ago after ingesting weedkiller. The motive was suspected to be a recent ovarian cancer diagnosis; Blow had a history of at least two suicide attempts, one involving her throwing herself from the elevated Hammersmith Flyover road in London.

Needless to say, there's a story to be told, and two different biographies, both scheduled for 2010, are in the works, reports the New York Observer. The first, Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow, is co-written by Isabella's husband of 18 years, Detmar Blow, and author Tom Sykes, who first met Isabella when he was 20 and his sister Plum Sykes was her assistant at Vogue.

Anna Wintour will be interviewed »

"there's no point in clomping around like a duck in flat shoes"

philleif — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:40:00 PDT

>> Quotes like that make Isabella Blow even more fascinating than she already was. Amy Larocca wrote a fantastically beautiful feature for New York Magazine on Issie - it's very much like a biographical vignette, with lots of great stories and quotes. For instance:

[Issie's] grandmother was most regularly described as a cannibal after once devouring a fantastic barbecue in Papua New Guinea only to be told it was human flesh, at which point, says Detmar [Issie's husband], she demanded more. How delicious!

I won't spoil any more of the brilliantly collected details for you, but I did very much like the view of fashion attributed to Ms. Blow:

“People think that fashion is all frivolity and done by people who can’t do proper jobs,” says the writer Adrian Gill, “but Issie understood that it is very, very serious business in terms of civilization and culture. It’s the one piece of culture that every single person in the world participates in. Not everybody reads poetry or listens to music, but every single person in the world gets up in the morning and puts on something, and whether you like it or not, that’s a statement about who you are.”

A little pretentious, perhaps, but I prefer to think in a similar way. I think it gives fashion the validation it generally deserves, even if there are little blips of frivolity here and there.

**image: BBC