Isabella Blow

Isabella Blow
Isabella Blow arrives as a guest at the Turner Prize, December 2005.
Born	Isabella Delves Broughton (1958-11-19)19 November 1958 Marylebone, London, England
Died	7 May 2007(2007-05-07) (aged 48) Gloucester, England
Years active	1993–2007
Spouse(s)	Nicholas Taylor (1981–1983) Detmar Blow (1989–2007)

Isabella "Issie" Blow (19 November 1958 – 7 May 2007) was an English magazine editor. The muse of hat designer Philip Treacy, she is credited with discovering the models Stella Tennant and Sophie Dahl as well as the fashion designer Alexander McQueen.

Born Isabella Delves Broughton in Marylebone, London, she was the eldest child of Major Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton, a military officer, and his second wife, Helen Mary Shore, a barrister. Sir Evelyn was the only son of Jock Delves Broughton; his sister, Rosamond, married Simon Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat in 1938.

Blow had two sisters, Julia and Lavinia; her brother, John, drowned in the family's swimming pool at the age of 2. This had a profound effect on her. In 1972, when she was 14, her parents separated and her mother left the household, bidding each daughter farewell with a handshake. Her parents divorced two years later. Isabella did not get along with her father, who bequeathed her only £5,000 from his estate, which was worth more than one million pounds. Blow often said her fondest memory was trying on her mother's pink hat, a recollection that she explained led to her career in fashion.

Blow studied for her A-levels at Heathfield School, after which she enrolled at a secretarial college and then took odd jobs. As she told Tamsin Blanchard of The Observer in 2002:

I've done the most peculiar jobs. I was working in a scone shop for years, selling apricot-studded scones. I was a cleaner in London for two years. I wore a handkerchief with knots on the side, and my cousin saw me in the post office and said, What are you doing? I said, What do you think I look like I'm doing? I'm a cleaner!

Blow moved to New York City in 1979 to study Ancient Chinese Art at Columbia University and shared a flat with the actress Catherine Oxenberg. A year later, she left the Art History programme at Columbia, moved to Texas, and worked for Guy Laroche. In 1981 she married her first husband, Nicholas Taylor (whom she divorced in 1983), and was introduced to the fashion director of the US edition of Vogue, Anna Wintour. She was hired initially as Wintour's assistant, but it was not long before she was assisting André Leon Talley, as of 2008 US Vogue's editor-at-large. While working in New York, she befriended Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.