摘自The Telegraph的Obituary, 寫得真好:
Isabella Blow, who died yesterday aged 48, was a
stylist once described as one of the 20 most important
people in fashion, and was seen by many in that peculiar
industry as a visionary figure; a wider public thought her a
wildly, wilfully eccentric figure, mainly because of her
hats: pheasants, lobsters, and antlers were often perched on
her head.
Isabella Blow was often described as a Muse to
designers; it might be truer to say that she occupied in
fashion a facilitating role similar to that played by Lady
Otteline Morrell in literature or Peggy Guggenheim in the
visual arts. Her primary talent was to identify talent in
others, at which her record was second to none. She was
responsible for discovering the milliner Philip Treacy and
bought the entire graduation collection of the then unknown
Alexander McQueen; she worked with Julien Macdonald as well
as being instrumental in the early careers of photographers
such as Juergen Teller, Alistair Thain and Sean Ellis, and
models such as Sophie Dahl, Stella Tennant and Honor Fraser.
She was born Isabella Delves Broughton on November 19
1958, the eldest daughter of Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton,
12th Bt. She grew up in Cheshire, 34,000 acres of which her
family had owned since the 14th century, until her
grandfather, Sir "Jock" Delves Broughton, sold most of it to
pay off his gambling debts. He then moved to Kenya, where he
was tried for, and acquitted of, the murder of the Earl of
Erroll, and eventually committed suicide. Isabella had an
awkward relationship with her father, who abandoned her
mother Helen, his second wife, and, when he died in 1993,
left Isabella £5,000 while leaving £7 million to his third
wife, Rona.
Izzy was educated at Heathfield, where a report
declared that she "occasionally talks too much but it is
always in a good cause"; she ended up as head of chapel and
formed an ambition to become a nun.
Instead she went to secretarial college, and took a
variety of jobs, in London. "I wore a handkerchief with
knots on the side, and my cousin saw me in the post office
and said, 'What are you doing?' I said, 'What do you think I
look like I'm doing? I'm a cleaner!'" As well as her
two-year cleaning stint, she worked in a scone shop, selling
apricot-studded scones.
In 1979 she went to Columbia University in New York to
study Ancient Chinese Art, and shared a room with the model,
actress and daughter of Princess Jelisaveta of Yugoslavia,
Catherine Oxenburg, who was later best-known for playing
Amanda Carrington in Dynasty. But she chucked her studies
after a year to work for the designer Guy Laroche in west
Texas, before getting her big break in fashion when she met
Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue, through Bryan and
Lucy Ferry, and was taken on as her assistant.
Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat became her
friends (though the latter refused to speak to her for a
year after she told him his Comme des Garçons duffle coat
was awful) and she took up with many of the city's
avant-garde. She also married, in 1981, an American,
Nicholas Taylor, though the union did not last, and they
were divorced in 1983.
In 1986 Isabella returned to Britain to work with
Michael Roberts, fashion director of both Tatler and The
Sunday Times. She made an immediate impression and by the
next year Mark Boxer had made her style editor at Tatler. In
1988 she met the barrister Detmar Blow at a wedding. They
were engaged within 16 days and married a year later.
In 1989 she first came across the young milliner
Philip Treacy, who had sent a green felt hat - "like
crocodile teeth" - to the Tatler offices.
She installed him in her mother-in-law's basement at
Elizabeth Street, near Victoria, where he worked in the
shed, with water dripping down the walls, turning out ever
more adventurous hats for her - though some of them were
more like eyepieces or feathered headdresses - as he
established his career. "If I am feeling really low, I go
and see Philip, cover my face and feel fantastic."
She bought all the pieces in Alexander McQueen's
graduation show at St Martin's for £5,000, paid off at £100
a week; they were delivered in a binbag. McQueen and Treacy
began collaborating; soon other designers, such as Macdonald
and Hussein Chalayan, were taken into Isabella Blow's
circle. In the early 1990s she joined British Vogue, where
she spent four years, before going back to The Sunday Times
as fashion director of its Style magazine. She also took on
consultancy work for DuPont fabrics and Swarovski crystals.
Her last role was back at Tatler, as fashion director,
by which point her contribution to the industry was widely
acknowledged: in 2002 she and Treacy were the subject of an
exhibition at the Design Museum. Two years later she had a
cameo in the film The Life Aquatic. Recently, she had been
suffering from cancer and was injured in a bad fall.
Gloucestershire Arts and Crafts house designed by his
grandfather, also Detmar Blow. She was a member of the Rare
Breeds Society.
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