By Sarah Caden
Monday May 14 2007

LESS than a fortnight ago, according to her editor at Tatler, Isabella Blow had visited the office, full of plans for a photo shoot. Not just any photo shoot, said Geordie Grieg on Monday, the day news broke of his fashion editor's death, but an extraordinary, epic affair.

"She wanted the photographs to be modern, erotic, naughty, the story of a badly behaved aristocrat," he said, "a bit like herself."

In so many ways, such a story captures essential aspects of Isabella Blow, who died suddenly last week, at the age of 48. It covers the aristocratic eccentricity; the flamboyance permitted a life-long sense of high-standing; the devil-may-care character of those with no Joneses to keep up with. Though this would be only one side of the story, the darker side of which ran to suicide attempts, a fragile second marriage, the sadness of infertility and, in the last year, diagnosis with cancer.

In life, Isabella Blow proved a mistress of distracting from the dark side of her story, with the hats, the clothes, the gash of scarlet lipstick, the huge laugh and the tall tales of her colourful adventures and ancestors. Her early and unhappy ending, however, lent a tragic tinge, though that in itself has its own, fitting sense of the dramatic.

Last week, reaction to Isabella Blow's death resulted in as many pictures as written words in newspapers. The stories ranged from sad to sensational, but the photographs were nothing short of extraordinary and startling. Naturally, the hats of Philip Treacy - whom Blow had nurtured before and during his success - featured in almost every shot. A lace mask with feather, horn-like plumes; a huge ship; a bejewelled butterfly; a Dali-esque lobster; a castle. They were all there, atop Blow's head, sometimes her face almost entirely obscured, only the characteristic red lips screaming out from below what was sometimes decoration, sometimes disguise, and even those who had never read a word by or about Blow knew immediately who she was.

Isabella Blow was somebody, both by accident and effort. She was somebody through having been born aristocratic and then, when that afforded her no cushion of affluence and ease, Blow made somebody special of herself. She was a creation, her own creation, though even the most careful self-styling cannot erase the elements imposed upon you by life and legacy.

Known as 'The Hat' to the late Princess Margaret, Blow was born Isabella Delves Broughton in 1958 and spent her early years at Doddington Castle, in Cheshire. She was the eldest child of three girls and a boy, born to Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton and his second wife, Helen Shaw, a grocer's daughter who distinguished herself at 21 by becoming the youngest solicitor in Britain.

When Blow - who absolutely adored her married name, particularly its more vulgar connotations - was four, her two-year-old brother drowned in the family's outdoor swimming pool. There were only a few inches of water in it at the time, but enough for a child to drown, while their mother had gone inside to apply lipstick for a photograph. It was a life-altering incident in Blow's life, not just for the loss of her brother, but of family life as she knew it.

In retrospect, Blow believed the girls did not matter much in the Delves Broughton family. With her brother went the family title, and soon after the girls were sent off to boarding school, where she became enthralled by ritual and costume, deciding she wanted to be a nun, possibly more keen on wearing the dramatic wimple than actually becoming a bride of Christ.

When Blow was 12, her mother left the family, offering a handshake to her daughters by way of a farewell. In recent years, Blow claimed anger at her mother still burned bright and that she had not seen her in over a decade. Though apparently deeply upset by her daughter's death, Lady Broughton commented during the week, "I don't know whether I shall or shan't attend the funeral. Anyway, I don't know when it will be."

According to Freud, people obsessed with changing fashion, with an absolute need to have always the latest thing, the next thing, are attempting to compensate for early lack of mother love. Isabella Blow often said her obsession with fashion began when she was seven and was photographed in one of her mother's hats and, further, she suspected her lipstick fixation stemmed from the day of her brother's drowning.

Isabella Blow maintained lipstick was vitally important. She found it difficult to speak to people who were not wearing it and, according to one former assistant, would scream at bare-lipped staff. Flat shoes elicited a similarly horrified reaction and when the clatter of Blow's own impossible heels was heard to approach, assistants would shove on their stilettos. In a way, Isabella Blow embraced fashion like a uniform or even an armour. If it was extraordinary enough, then that was all people saw, thus registering the wearer as exceptional.

In the late Seventies, Blow moved to New York, where she studied Chinese Art at Columbia University and became friends with the likes of Warhol and Basquiat. She associated with artists and designers and musicians and, through her friendship with Bryan Ferry, was introduced to Anna Wintour, then fashion director at US Vogue. Unexpectedly, given her Devil Wears Prada-style reputation for ferocity and intolerance, Wintour was patient and forgiving of Blow's eccentricity and has said her inefficiency was more than made up for by her entertaining originality. She wasn't an effective assistant but she was memorable, turning up for work dressed like a maharajah or a Napoleonic soldier. Quickly, she graduated to assisting the editor of US Vogue and when Blow returned to Britain in the mid-Eighties, she began work at Tatler and, later, as fashion editor of The Sunday Times Style magazine.

It was while at Tatler that Isabella Blow came across Philip Treacy. The Galway-born milliner was studying for an MA at the Royal College of Art and had sent a hat to Tatler, a green creation Blow spotted "jumping out of a box, looking like a crocodile".

Instantly she was captivated and began phoning Treacy, asking that he design the headdress for her impending wedding to Detmar Blow. Treacy was initially reluctant, imagining the usual pearls and lace affair, but instead found a woman who understood hats as an act ofrebellion.

Isabella Delves Broughton married Detmar Blow in 1989, only 16 weeks after first meeting him. She had been married before, in America, but that marriage had proved short-lived. Detmar Blow, an art dealer, proved more understanding of her, the devotion to fashion, the burgeoning ability to spot and cultivate the 'next big thing'. In the early years of the Blows' marriage, Treacy was the big thing, taking up residence in the basement of their Belgravia home, where he built up his collection and connections, while she became the ultimate model of his work. The hats, she often said, were a salve to feelings of melancholy and inadequacy and a visit to Philip Treacy was her self-prescription when times were bad. And the worse the depression, the bigger, the more concealing, the hat.

Later, Isabella Blow discovered Alexander McQueen, buying up his entire graduate show collection and using her considerable influence and network to boost his career.

"His success was really great for my reputation," Blow admitted, "because if that hadn't happened, I would have just been an eccentric and gone down the drain."

Further, Blow developed an ability to talent spot models, discovering the teenage Sophie Dahl - "a blow-up doll with brains" - as well as Honor Fraser and Stella Tennant. Some people have an eye for beauty, and not seeing it in the mirror might well wound when you have such an ability. For Isabella Blow was not beautiful, and she knew it.

Her mother, Blow always said, was utterly bourgeois and loathed how her eldest daughter dressed, but that suited Blow. She had no desire for her mother's approval - quite the opposite - and had she played safe, sartorially, Blow would have seemed an unremarkable woman. Instead, she cultivated an appearance that announced the larger-than-life aspect of her huge personality.

When, after school and secretarial school, Blow worked for a time as a cleaner, she wore a Stan Ogden-style handkerchief on her head, knotted in four corners, the costume of her assumed role. If she was to be a cleaner, Blow had to work at it with the oomph she brought to everything.

For while she was aristocratic by birth, Isabella Blow had no inherited wealth. The relationship with her father was less than happy and, after his death in 1993, Blow was left only £5,000 of his wealth. The bulk of the estimated stg£5m and Doddington Castle were left to Rona, the Baronet's third wife, whom Blow described as "a creature from a council flat in Cardiff".

So, as with many who have the breeding and the background, if not the wealth, Isabella Blow became resourceful. While building a career around fashion and fashionable people, she also worked at constructing herself as a character. Part of this was a parading of her colourful family history; if she had no money to show for them, at least she had some great stories, perhaps.

Blow's grandfather, "Jock" Delves Broughton, was the most significant player in the stories from her past, as the man who lost the 34,000 acres around Doddington Castle through gambling and then left for Kenya, where he was tried for the infamous Happy Valley murder that became the film, White Mischief. Delves Broughton was acquitted of murdering the man with whom his wife was having an affair, Lord Erroll, but took his life with a heroin overdose a year later, in a Liverpool hotel.

Her grandfather's story was told with the same blithe spirit as Blow brought to tales of her grandmother's life. Until the last decade, Vera Delves Broughton held the record for catching the largest tuna in European waters, she was an expert in Pygmies and her Who's Who entry read, "was once a cannibal", based on an alleged 'long pig' eating incident in Papua New Guinea.

The latter detail has apocryphal potential, but it made a good story, and Blow regularly related it, as if by way of explanation for her own flamboyance. For Isabella Blow loved her cultivated impression and played upon it, loved the reactions she got talking crudely about sex in her cut-glass accent and the attention her clothes invited. She was a character, but a character who suffered badly from depression and was denied much of what she wanted, from her family beginnings to her untimely end.

In 2004 - two years after she left The Sunday Times to become fashion director of Tatler - Isabella and Detmar Blow separated. He had begun an affair with someone else, but the marriage had come unstuck through their efforts to start a family, including failed attempts at IVF. Later, Blow entertained interviewers with details of what she got up to during the estrangement, in particular an affair with a gondolier.

"He was so good-looking, but god, he ripped me off," she said, claiming to have sold a stg£15,000 portrait of her grandmother to save her lover's business. The Blows reunited, but their desire for a child was unfulfilled.

"I have my hats instead," Isabella Blow said, "and now they're all battered and destroyed, like me."

Two years ago, Isabella Blow attempted suicide by jumping off a London flyover she believed to be a prize example of modern architecture. Blow did not die, but so badly injured her feet and legs that she was left with a permanent limp. What followed was a series of treatments, including electroshock therapy, and a further suicide attempt, this time with pills.

"Thoughts of suicide were a big part of her existence and her persona," said American fashion designer, Zac Posen, last week, while Detmar Blow admitted that his late wife once told him that her depression was probably something she would never beat.

Ovarian cancer was the last blow for Isabella. Given her efforts to have a baby, the variety must have seemed particularly unkind and opinions on how she coped have been 'Isabella Blow loved her cultivated impression, loved the reactions she got talking crudely about sex in her cut-glass accent'

mixed. Her husband described her last week as "indefatigable", her Tatler editor spoke of someone still looking to the next job, though not necessarily the future so much as the past, even her own past.

According to some reports, last weekend found Isabella Blow entertaining guests at the Cotswolds Arts and Crafts house she shared with her husband. Allegedly, Blow told friends she was going shopping, before poisoning herself and dying on Monday. Detmar Blow has declined to confirm this, admitting it was no secret his wife suffered from depression but stating it was the cancer that killed her. Which, suicide or not, it might well have been.

Many times, Isabella Blow said she knew the hat in which she wished to be buried. A Philip Treacy creation, of course, a magically realistic and imposing pheasant that took over the entire head,with the scarlet lips its only competition.

A final statement, a fitting final costume for an aristocrat behaving badly.

Sarah Caden

- Sarah Caden

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