In Memory of Isabella Blow

(NEW YORK) Isabella Blow, style muse, former fashion director of Tatler and London's Sunday Times, and one-time assistant to Anna Wintour, has died. The much-revered icon, who had been battling cancer, reportedly passed away suddenly early Monday morning in Gloucester, England. She was 49.

One of the industry's most unconventional personalities, Blow was never without one of her signature hats atop her short dark hair. The headwear, created by her friend and former protégé Philip Treacy, ranged from feather headdresses to face masks to a "Blow" headband that she sported last summer on the Zac Posen/Vakko trip to Istanbul. Treacy and Blow met on a fashion shoot in 1989, a chance encounter that spawned countless collaborations and was chronicled in an exhibit at the London Design Musuem, When Philip Met Isabella: Philip Treacy's Hats For Isabella Blow.

Treacy was not the only one to benefit from her fashion vision. In 1993, Blow was so impressed with the degree show of a Central Saint Martin's graduate that she purchased the entire collection: his name was Alexander McQueen. But however instrumental she had been in McQueen's career, Blow remained humble. "His [Alexander McQueen's] success has been really great for my reputation, because if that hadn't happened, I would have just been an eccentric and gone down the drain," she told Interview Magazine in 1998. "But I don't like to say that I 'discover' people. That can sound quite pretentious. In my view, the people who will succeed in fashion are the people who know how to cut. And who are sexy." Blow's other discoveries included models like Stella Tennant, Honor Fraser, and Sophie Dahl.

"Issy was someone who, from the beginning, never had an off day from fashion," says Vogue European editor Hamish Bowles. "The industry will miss her vision and her visual impact; young designers will miss her thoughtfulness and inspiration. She opened McQueen to the whole world of medievalism and the Tudors, and she was a great historian-a completely inspiring personage in the great image of British figures."

The London-born Blow moved to New York in 1979 to study ancient Chinese art at Columbia University. It was two years later that her fashion fate was sealed and she was introduced to Wintour, then the fashion director at Vogue, and began working as her assistant. She returned to London in 1986 as a fashion assistant, first at Tatler and then the Sunday Times. She worked for British Vogue for four years beginning in 1993, before joining the Sunday Times Style magazine and, then, Tatler, where she most recently held the title of contributing fashion editor-at-large.

In 1989, she married the art dealer Detmar Blow, but in recent years their relationship had become strained. In June 2006, she was hospitalized after enduring a fall which left her in very serious condition and sparked initial rumors that she was suffering from depression.
MEREDITH FISHER