Isabella Blow:'A cross between a Billingsgate fishwife and Lucretia Borgia." That was how fashion designer Alexander McQueen once described Isabella Blow, at various times fashion supremo of Tatler, Vogue and the Sunday Times, who has died aged 48 after suffering from cancer and depression.
She was most famous as a talent-spotter and benefactor to young designers. She championed McQueen after buying his entire graduate collection in 1992, and discovered and nurtured the Irish milliner Philip Treacy, whose hats became her trademark. She also discovered the models Sophie Dahl and Stella Tennant.
The family of Isabella Blow - or Izzie, as she was known - had lived at Doddington, a castle with 35,000 acres of land in Cheshire, since the 14th century, but it was sold to pay off her grandfather's gambling debts. As a child, Blow could see the castle only from her family's cottage on the estate. When she was 14, her mother announced she was leaving the family, shook her hand and said goodbye; Blow rarely saw her after that. Her father, Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton, remarried. When he died in 1993, he left her £5,000 of his £6 million fortune.
She moved to New York in 1979 to study Chinese art at Columbia University. In 1981, she married Nicholas Taylor, but they divorced two years later. Her friend, the musician Bryan Ferry, introduced her to Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue, who hired her as her assistant.
Blow became part of the avant-garde New York scene and was friends with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She came back to London in 1986 as assistant to the then Tatler fashion director, Michael Roberts. In 1993 she went to British Vogue, and after the Sunday Times returned to Tatler as fashion director.
In 1989, she met her second husband, Detmar Blow. When they married at Gloucester Cathedral, she wore a headdress commissioned by the then unknown Treacy, which marked the start of their friendship.
Towards the end of her life, Blow had become as recognisable as the designers she championed. The Design Museum in London held an exhibition in 2002 entitled When Philip Met Isabella, celebrating the relationship between Treacy and his muse, which travelled to the National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks, in 2005.
She is survived by Detmar Blow.
Isabella Blow: born November 19th, 1958; died May 7th, 2007