Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow: The Woman Who Saw the Genius Before Everyone Else

Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow: The Woman Who Saw the Genius Before Everyone Else

There are fashion discoveries, and then there are moments when one person looks at another person's work and understands its future before almost anyone else can see it. In 1992, Isabella Blow walked into a Central Saint Martins graduate show and encountered a collection by a 23-year-old Lee Alexander McQueen. It was dark, historical, sexually charged and unmistakably strange. McQueen called it Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims. Blow did not see a promising student. She saw a fashion language that had not yet found its voice.

She became one of the most important champions of his early career. He became one of the designers who defined British fashion in the 1990s and beyond. Their relationship was complicated by ambition, money, fame, disappointment and mental illness, but its creative impact is difficult to overstate. Blow did not simply "discover" Alexander McQueen. She recognized what was already there, then used her connections, wardrobe and reputation to make other people look.

And McQueen, in turn, gave Blow some of the clothes through which her own extraordinary image became inseparable from fashion history.

Isabella Blow: Growing Up Among Beauty and Loss

Isabella Delves Broughton was born in London in 1958 and grew up in Cheshire, in an aristocratic family whose social history was considerably grander than its financial reality. Her grandfather had been associated with the infamous White Mischief scandal in Kenya, and the family had experienced a long decline from wealth and position. By Isabella's childhood, the family lived in a cottage on the grounds of what had once been a much grander estate.

The atmosphere was complicated by tragedy.

When Isabella was a child, her younger brother John drowned in the family's swimming pool. Accounts differ on some details of the incident, including precisely how old Isabella was and the circumstances surrounding it, but the death profoundly affected her family. Her parents later separated, and Isabella would carry the memory of that childhood loss throughout her life.