Fashion Eccentric Isabella Blow Succumbs to Ovarian Cancer. FASHIONTRIBES FASHION BLOG

As WWD recently pointed out, stylist & over-the-top fashionista-about-London Isabella Blow may not have been born a beauty queen, but her fearless sense of the out-there endowed her with timeless & inimitable Style (yes, with a capital "S").

"She was often misunderstood as a crazy woman with a hat on. But she wasn't," her pal, the milliner Philip Treacy recently told WWD. She had one very unusual quality in the fashion world — she had a heart. She was intelligent, cultivated, interesting. Her defiance and her unusual perspective on everything was an inspiration to designers and creative people. She had a belief in you as an individual. Whether you were Alexander McQueen, Sophie Dahl, Stella Tennant or me. That belief was incredibly inspiring to young designers."

While most of the fashion pack is just that (and mostly deserving of being dubbed the "pointy toe" crowd), Blow rocked fashion like an original, and championing new talent like Alexander McQueen, Treacy, and models like Stella Tennant and Sophie Dahl. "[She] was the most incredible discoverer and encourager of talent," says Vogue Europe editor Hamish Bowles. "She was absolutely an inspiration, not just in the abstract sense of looking so extraordinary and breathtaking, and putting together things in such an unexpected way, but also in opening designers' eyes to historical references. She was someone who consumed fashion at its rawest extreme." Agrees Michael Roberts, the Fashion Director at Vanity Fair who worked with Blow when he was at Tatler in the 80s. "She was just great from the get-go. To me, she was in the long line of English eccentrics, like Edith Sitwell and Ottoline Morrell. She was marvelous because she comes from that amazing 'White Mischief' background. At Tatler, all her amazing dotty friends were perfect fodder for the magazine."

For more photos of the one & only Isabella Blow, CLICK HERE.

- Lesley Scott

(photo: WWD.com)

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