A Must See: The 'Isabella Blow – Fashion Galore' Exhibition

You could say I looked like a ‘keen bean’ standing outside Somerset House at 9:45 for the 10 o’clock opening of the new exhibition: ‘Isabella Blow – Fashion Galore’; but as per, the fashion world has never failed to fascinate me.

Isabella Blow 

“She’d walk through the Sunday Times office with giant Jeremy Scott fur shoulder pads with antlers, and then happily sit in the canteen with the News International printers and have roast beef and potatoes.”

                Her editor at the Sunday Times Style Magazine

“She was an academic with a punk rockers anarchic sense.”

                Geordie Greig, her editor at Tatler.

Fusing the eccentricity of Vivienne Westwood, and the expertise of Anna Wintour, she certainly was a fashion-force to be reckoned with.

Having worked as fashion director at the Sunday Times Style Magazine, Tatler, Vogue, and more, she was not only a master in the magazine industry, but also key to the success of many designers that we casually see today.

Isabella started to ‘court’ young designers, “truffling for talent” as her friend Hamish Bowles described it. Then in 1989 she met Philip Treacy, the hat designer, and commissioned him to make her headdress for her wedding to Philip Blow. 

In 1992 another crucial acquaintance was made. At the Central Saint Martins MA fashion show, Alexander McQueen presented his collection; a group of garments that had been inspired by Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel victims in 1888. Isabella Blow reputedly bought the entire collection despite the expense being beyond her financial means; she paid him £100 a week and received one item of clothing a month! It is good to see that apparently even the fashion elite undergo the dilemma of the average shopaholic! 

As the exhibition unfolded so did a wonderland of innovation.

The 1996 A/W collection that Blow styled for Alexander McQueen featured a fusion of structure and lace, an essence of religious iconography mingled with military forms. At one point I admittedly began to wonder if the beast from 'The Great God Pan', a book I read the day previously, was coming to life before me in one of McQueen’s designs. This particular design was of black lace, and featured a headdress that protruded from underneath the breasts, over a pair of antlers, and then draped down the model’s back. But this is a typical talent of McQueen’s; he manages to master the balance between repulsion and magnetism. As Blow commented:

                “What attracted me to Alexander was the crazy way he takes ideas from the past and sabotages them…it is the complexity and severity of his approach to cut that makes him so modern.”

 

Additionally, the 1996 Philip Treacy show styled by Blow presents millinery in a way that I have never seen before, and a way that - quite frankly - puts Ascot to shame.

‘Isabella Blow – Fashion Galore’ features not only the 1996 collections of Treacy and McQueen that Blow styled and piloted into success, but also the collaborative collection, ‘La Dame Bleue’, that the latter two great fashion minds created to commemorate the unfortunate suicide of Blow in 2007.

If you want to be in a state of unutterable awe at how one mind can be so innovative with shape, you MUST see this exhibition – you will not regret it.