By Hugo Tatchell
Every era needs someone slightly unhinged standing at the door with a hat that looks like a lobster, deciding who gets in. Britain's nineties and early two-thousands had Isabella Blow, and fashion has arguably not fully recovered from losing her.
The facts, briefly, because they undersell her: born Isabella Delves Broughton to a Norfolk military family, she landed in New York in her twenties as an assistant to a young Anna Wintour, then returned to London and set about discovering people. She bought Alexander McQueen's entire graduate collection before he had a shop, a reputation, or, by some accounts, much money to his name, a gesture that reads today as canny patronage and at the time was simply Issy, being unable to resist a talent she could see and nobody else yet could. She installed the milliner Philip Treacy in her own flat to make his hats. She wore those hats, vast, sculptural, faintly alarming things, for the excellent stated reason that they kept people at a distance. It rather says everything about her that she needed a defence mechanism and built it out of couture.
What I find myself returning to isn't the discoveries, impressive as they are, but the style of patronage itself. Blow wasn't a collector in the acquisitive sense, she didn't hoard careers the way some people hoard snuffboxes. She seems to have operated on pure instinct and a kind of reckless generosity, handing her considerable social capital to unknown twenty-somethings because she liked what she saw, with no guarantee any of it would work. It mostly did, spectacularly, and by the time she died in 2007, a loss the industry still speaks about with a specific kind of grief, distinct from ordinary obituary sentiment, McQueen and Treacy were both established names who owed her, by their own repeated admission, a great deal.
Fashion likes to mythologise its editors and its designers. It is worse, I think, at mythologising the people in between, the ones who create nothing wearable themselves but without whom half the wearable things wouldn't exist. Blow deserves better than to be remembered chiefly for the hats. She was the nineties' great talent scout, operating on nerve and eye alone, and Britain has not really produced another one since.