elegantly dressed Tuesday

The baroque EDW is brought to you early this week, in response to the news that Isabella Blow has died, suffering from both cancer and depression. Poison is suspected.*

It just didn't seem right to wait a day.

There are people who bring a new dimension to fashion, for whom it is a state of being rather than just an irksome moment in front of the wardrobe. In daily life they often get on people's nerves: "I'm sure a nice suit from M&S would be perfectly good," we say to them (not that I have ever said this to anyone).

Isabella Blow was one of those people, and the rest of us should realise that they are a gift. First of all, they point us to things we would never have thought of. Secondly, we can live vicariously through them, even when afflicted with the most sensible shoes in the world. And most crucially, there is nothing like a person walking into the room** wearing, say, a tiny hat with a veil, or bright red lipstick and a perfect satin*** coat, to make you realise you are being incredibly lazy in your approach to life.

I am the first to admit that I can be very lazy about these matters - you should see what I wear around the house - and indeed my knees can be a bit dodgy for serious shoe-wearing, though I think falling down the stairs at a party in four-inch heels last December pretty much established my credibility there! Still, one can do one's best. Right now I am wearing dolly shoes - that is, ballet-style - with a big bow in the front, made of what looks like antique tin foil. Never mind that I got them in Office. (I've always wondered - when they opened that shop, why did they think anyone would want to buy shoes in a shop called Office?? Surely "The Mandarin Pleasure Garden" would be more enticing.)

I used to wear hats, and indeed I used to have an entire wall on my landing hung with all kinds of hats. Well - not all kinds. No Philip Treacy. They were mostly a bit beaten-up, but of good quality and all vintages, including a rakish satin-crowned hat from the 1910's, with a moulded brim and an ostrich feather. I spent £18 on it in 1988, and my then-future husband said (I'm sure, trying to be encouraging etc) that we should go somewhere nice so I could wear it. I still remember the sinking feeling that I was perhaps snapping, when I said: "Wear it?? I'm never going to wear it! That's not the point." But maybe I should have.

Isabella Blow bought Alexander McQueen's entire graduate collection. He was trying to sell her a coat, and she bought the lot for £5,000, which took her - I forget where I read this - some considerable time to pay off. I really admire that. It's a lesson to the rest of us.

What Isabella Blow realised is that it's not really about whether you look "perfectly good" or even "pretty": it's about whether you've bothered. We all know you get out what you put in, and that goes for pleasure and beauty too.

The Daily Mail quotes Anna Wintour, surely one of the scariest women in the universe:

"In a world that's largely driven by corporate culture she was a joy to have," Wintour added. "She was not too good at getting to the office before 11am, but then she would arrive dressed as a maharaja or an Edith Sitwell figure.

"I don't think she ever did my expenses but she made life much more interesting."

And this anecdote, in today's Guardian obituary, sums it up:

"At a lunch with Nicholas Coleridge, managing director of Condé Nast, she wore a pair of antlers covered in a heavy black lace veil. When he asked how she would able to eat, she said: 'Nicholas, that is of no concern to me whatsoever'."

But the final word must go to Isabella herself:

"Fashion is a vampiric thing," she says (in an interview with the Observer in 2002). "It's the hoover on your brain. That's why I wear the hats, to keep everyone away from me. They say, 'Oh, can I kiss you?' I say, "No, thank you very much. That's why I've worn the hat. Goodbye."















* This is impossibly elegant, however sad. The saddest details of Blow's life are also some of the most elegant ones (this could be the beginning of a whole new train of thought, but I'm not going to indulge it). According to Tamsin Blanchard in the aforementioned Observer piece:

"Although her family has lived in Doddington, a castle in Cheshire, since the 14th century, and owned 34,000 acres of land at the turn of the century, her grandfather, Sir Jock Delves Broughton sold most of it off to pay gambling debts. After his flesh-eating wife left him, he moved to Kenya where he was accused of the White Mischief murder of Lord Erroll. He was acquitted, but eventually committed suicide. Isabella's father, Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton, ran off with another woman and disinherited Isabella when he died in 1994, leaving her just £5,000 of his £6m estate."

** or even just a picture of someone walking into a room... and that, my dears, is just what EDW is about!

*** although satin is in fact the stuff of the devil, in its unwearability.