BLOW’S BRILLIANCE REMEMBERED IN PRINT

Hot off the press: BLOW BY BLOW: The Story of Isabella Blow, from publisher Harper Collins/It Books. It’s the latest volume about the late, great style icon Isabella Blow, fashion’s most thrillingly zany Mad Hatter, who explained that she often wore outrageous, outlandish hats simply to prevent from people trying to give her meaningless, social kisses in public.

Journalist Rachel Cooke, writing about Blow for The Observer in October, 2010, described her in this way:

“She was filthy and funny and ridiculous. She was born in the wrong time. I cannot quite believe that she really existed, much less that I once shared a desk with her. The desk was grey, but the woman who sometimes deigned to visit it seemed to be permanently aflame, a dazzling heap of feathers and fur and leather. We laughed at her, but a tiny part of us was in awe. “

This new bio recounts how “Issy” discovered the young Sophie Dahl, sobbing on a stoop because her mother wanted her to go to secretarial school. Instead, with Blow’s support, she became the world’s first and most famous plus-sized supermodel.

And co-author Detmar Blow, Issy’s husband of 18 years, minces no words regarding Issy’s famous nurturing of fashion’s ruffian-prince Alexander McQueen. In a nutshell, she scooped him up, adored him, paid his bills, gave him a place to live and work, suggested that he used his regal middle name instead of “Lee”, and made him a star. And, in the end, he flicked her away like a speck of lint.

Talk about a low blow.

Blow’s bittersweet allure persists – another bio is due out in December, others in the works, and the authors are all squabbling about who captured the “real” Issy. Certainly a biopic or MOW is in the making—and the incompleteness of these portraits makes us miss her even more.