Isabella Blow by Martina Rink

© Metropolitan Magazine 2010
Martina Rink was assistant to Isabella Blow until Blow's tragic suicide in 2007

In the fashion world the late Alexander McQueen was an enigmatic figure of few words. But when it came to describing Isabella Blow, his muse and earliest supporter, he captured her effortlessly: 'A cross between a Billingsgate fishwife and Lucretia Borgia'. Coming from the East-End born legend of contemporary fashion, this was not only a compliment but an incisive articulation of what made Isabella so unique.

Isabella Blow discovered talent and set them on the road to legend status. Having purchased McQueen's graduate show for [£500] (and paid for it in monthly instalments), she gave up her basement in Elizabeth Street to allow him to work and develop his extraordinary style. A few years later, she set up a meeting with the Gucci brand and oversaw a deal that was to cement his name on the international stage.

When McQueen closed his Spring 1996 show in Hawksmoor's gothic Christchurch in Spitalfield's, he handed one bunch of flowers to his mother, and one to Isabella. Such was the intimacy of their relationship, which he frequently said was something beyond fashion. Yet the relationship, which was a marriage of similarities and opposites and in many ways one of guarded admiration on both sides, was not quite so openly mutual as that between Isabella and her most recognisable discovery, the international milliner Philip Treacy.

Without her Treacy hats, the image of Isabella that is imprinted on the public mind would be very different. For her, the hat became an essential part of who she was. More than just an accessory, she claimed it served an endless array of purposes, and she summed up Philip's talent with hats in typical style: 'He’s like a cosmetic surgeon for your face. Your face has a different personality for each one you’re wearing.'

It was during Philip's first year at London's Royal College of Art in 1989, when he was visiting the offices of Tatler to pick up a hat he had made for a photo shoot, that the two first met. The next day, while he was at college, she got in touch and put in an order for a series of hats for her forthcoming wedding to Detmar Blow. Philip, still a student and with no business to his name, found that Isabella was about to bring his career to life for the first time. The relationship that ensued would last her lifetime.

Isabella inspired many other names in the fashion and art worlds, from the well-known fixtures on the fashion scene such as Hussein Chalayan and Manolo Blahnik to lesser-known and curious creative experimentalists such as Ebe Oke, who she discovered making music from recorded birdsongs in the Deep South. But her nurturing and harnessing of talent was a habit driven by her passion for creativity, rather than a calculated end-goal. From day to day she was a professional in her own right, working first at Vogue in New York under the eye of Anna Wintour, and then moving on to Tatler in the UK. At Vogue, her reputation quickly spread as she invited artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol into the office, while displaying excessive habits such as cleaning her desk with Perrier water and Chanel No.5. At Tatler, it was her own creative talent that flourished, as she made a name for herself commissioning and styling risqué photo shoots with photographers such as Donald McPherson, Robert Astley Sparke and Sean Ellis.

The theatre and performance of fashion, and the way in which it disguised, dressed up and exploited different aspects of the personality that lay beneath the surface, went to the heart of the challenging image that Isabella represented. Often exploring the subject of her own appearance, she regularly expressed contradictory views, once describing her own face as 'ugly. I know that’s subjective, so perhaps I should stay instead that I’m striking. My face is like a Plantagenet portrait.' Such comments, while openly self-effacing, hinted at an underlying sense of discomfort she felt towards herself, and it was a sign of harder times to come for the figure that had by then become a living icon of the fashion world. 'Death,' she said, 'is a big thing , I'm afraid, for me.'

Isabella extended her hand to many people, some famous, some not. I was lucky enough to be one of them. As a fashion student travelling to the fashion weeks in London, Paris and Milan, it was Isabella that took me under her wing and walked me into shows to see Kenzo, McQueen and others. From the moment that I glimpsed her for the first time, stepping out of the elevator in the Savoia in Milan complete with stunning Treacy hat, I saw how she dominated the room and knew I had to introduce myself to her. Her subsequent decision to open doors for me to film what was a notoriously closed industry was something that changed my life.

By the time I became a personal assistant to Isabella, the world had begun to darken for her – or rather, she was no longer enjoying the darkness that she had once so beautifully harnessed in her gothic photo shoots. True to style, however, her decision to bow out did not bring an end to her extraordinary performance. As she approached her final moments she insisted, impractically, on wearing an extraordinary silver 1930s lamé dress.

As Philip Treacy said, to see the two-dimensional Isabella Blow of television and magazines was one thing, but to witness the three-dimensional Isabella was quite another. My hope is that the Isabella Blow book, written by all those who knew her best, will serve as a genuine tribute to her memory, and in articulating the vision of Isabella from such diverse viewpoints, it will come close to preserving some of her three-dimensional wonder.

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