Isabella Blow Dies at 49

Isabella Blow, fashion stylist and muse to designers including Alexander McQueen and Philip Treacy died late Sunday or early Monday at Hilles, her partner's family home in Gloucestershire. Friends close to her say suicide is thought to be the cause of death.

Isabella Blow at London's Serpentine Gallery November 26, 2006

Blow was an extraordinary figure in the fashion world. In her friendships with designers like McQueen and Treacy, she inspired them to push their imagination to its fantastical limits -- and had no qualms about wearing the results be it a lobster hat or a suit of armor. In 2001, The New Yorker said "she produces the effect of a large and bewildering work of public art." She is also credited with discovering the model Sophie Dahl, whom she called a "blow-up doll with brains." But beneath the eccentric costume beat an often troubled heart. Although she came from an aristocratic family -- and married into another -- money was scarce. Her father left her nothing when he died. Her role as mentor to young designers was an unpaid one, and trying to transfer her elusive energy into a paying job was not an easy task. She spoke frequently at her frustrations in trying to support herself and of her fear of growing older. She complained in interviews that while the designers she mentored got rich, she did not.

It was easy to ridicule Isabella for lavish tastes and impractical attitudes (she was notoriously impractical with money, both her own and that of the companies she worked for) but those were exactly the things that made her such a unique and important presence in today's fashion business. She felt it her obligation to wear the clothes, no matter how outrageous, lest the designers decide to tame their imaginations to find patrons for their work. Sitting next to her at a show, one could become deafened by the sound of her raucous cheering and clapping. This, it seemed, was a woman who had found her true calling. Which might be part of the reason I was so struck by something she told Larissa MacFarquhar in the same New Yorker profile.

She worries, too, that she and Detmar might be turning into the Duke and Duchess of Windsor: she feels there might be some unhappy connection between an overdeveloped interest in clothes and being infertile (Isabella and Detmar cannot have children). "The Duke and Duchess were like two little toys," she says sadly. "They never had any children, so they just dressed each other all the time."

There was great passion in Isabella, but behind it there was also great sadness. For the last few years she battled with depression and was in and out of hospitals. It is her passion that I hope will be celebrated and somehow channeled to future generations of designers who won't be able to benefit from her encouragement and her so-very-vocal love of the craft.

Photo by Dave Benett/Getty Images