It is a history lesson in hats
Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images for Somerset House Did you know, for example, that in 18th-century France there was a fashion for elegant women to wear model ships in their hair, to celebrate French victories over the English at sea? I didn't, until I learned from the caption accompanying the "galleon" hat that it was this story, told by Isabella to Philip Treacy, that inspired it. Blow had a wealth of knowledge about history, and about the countryside and nature – she was a great lover of gardens, and roses – and a knack for plucking out colourful titbits with which to feed her proteges. Blow told her own story in hats: her fondest memory of her mother, who famously offered her 14-year-old daughter a formal handshake on the day she left the family home, was being allowed to try on her pink hat. The story she liked to tell about meeting her husband Detmar Blow began with him complimenting her hat.
It is a story about the power of fashion – and its limitations
Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images for Somerset House The exhibition is a biography, in clothes, of a woman who once said that the mood-altering effect of hats was better than antidepressants, but who took her own life. Fashion was the great love of Blow's life, the focus of her passion and talent – but towards the end, she felt that the designers she had nurtured had left her behind. This is an exhibition with a very clear agenda: to give Blow the place in fashion history that she deserves. Driven in large part by her friends Daphne Guinness and Treacy, the show gives Blow a posthumous third act. In other words, this is not just hats, it is the backstory of modern British fashion being rewritten.
It is very funny
An odd pair of Alain Tondowski shoes. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images for Somerset House One of my favourite non-hat exhibits is a fax sent to Blow by an exasperated assistant during her time working at the Sunday Times, which conjures up a vivid picture of the thankless and impossible task of pinning the stylist down to budgets and RSVPs. Blow was very funny – she had a honking laugh, which Alexander McQueen said reminded him of a Billingsgate fishwife – and was uncowed by the worry that she might be thought mad. (Andy Warhol befriended her at a party, because she was wearing mismatched shoes.) At her funeral, her friend Rupert Everett described her as "a one-off ... your own creation in a world of copycats" and that bumptuous originality shines through here. The overall mood is bittersweet, but never maudlin.
This is an eyewitness account of the Cool Britannia era
Hussein Chalayan show, Paris fashion week, 2008. Photograph: Antonio De Moraes Barros Filho/WireImage Blow was instrumental in pushing into the limelight many of the key talents who defined Britain's renaissance as a creative powerhouse in the 1990s. Never a bandwagon-jumper, she was there right from the start. At Hussein Chalayan's graduate show, she sent him off to find a roll of bin bags, helped him pack the clothes in them, and marched him over to Browns boutique, where Joan Burstein put the collection in the window. At one point early in their careers, she had both Treacy and McQueen living and working in her Belgravia house. There was a kind of magic in the air: as Blow puts it, Treacy's incredible hats were appearing in his little basement studio "like muffins popping out of toasters". Blow "wasn't just providing money or opportunity, she was grabbing people by the collar and leading them into their future", says curator Alistair O'Neill. "I look at fashion now and I don't see who those people are."
Clothes that someone has worn are much more fun than an 'archive'
Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images for Somerset House When O'Neill and the curators first examined the collection, they were hit by a wave of Fracas – the scent that Blow always wore, and with which McQueen perfumed the venue for his La Dame Bleue collection after her death, which was dedicated to Blow. "There is a very physical presence of Isabella in these clothes," says O'Neill. "We've got an exquisite McQueen hawthorn jacket which has a huge cigarette burn in it. Her hats were endlessly getting damaged where she would lean forward to light a cigarette off a candelabra at dinner." Sedately displayed on a pedestal are a pair of Givenchy haute couture mules, their silk-wrapped heels ripped to shreds at some party or another. There is a kind of innocence to this way of dressing, a storybook joie de vivre. Unfortunately, like all the best fairytales, it ends badly.
Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! is at Somerset House, London WC2 from 20 November 2013 to 2 March 2014
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