“Get off me you silly Shri Lanki”

Blow married her first husband, Nicholas Taylor in 1981, and then later remarried Detmar Blow at Gloucester Cathedral in 1989, with Isabella’s headgear made by Phillip Traecy. Their relationship appeared extremely extraordinary to the outside world. For Detmar, it was love at first sight. He virtually stalked her before eventually inviting her out for dinner. According to Detmar she arrived in a Pam Hogg look, a style incredibly feared by the fashion apprehensive. When Blow went upstairs to make a call, he pounced on her to make it precisely clear where his interests lay. He recalls it as “very nice, it was more than sex”. A short sixteen days later they were engaged. Their relationship seemed to appear like a whirlwind romance, they were both tied together through their family’s tragic histories, Detmar’s father also killed himself using weed killer. However far-fetched from the traditional Disney plots, there was never a quiet or subdued moment, despite their infamous break-up for a mere twelve months in 2004, to allow Detmar to father children due to Isabella’s infertility- one of the main causes of her neurotic depression. Isabella reportedly had an eccentric liaison with a gondolier in Venice while Detmar went on to have an affair with Stephanie Theobald, the society editor of British Harpers Bazaar.

During this brief separation Isabella was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder and began undergoing electric shock therapy, for a while the treatment appeared to be helpful when until briefly after their reconciliation she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

 The couple took the Blow’s fantasy arts and crafts family home, Hiller in Gloucester. Despite their lack of money, they both shared a wild craving for glamour and threw their family home open to aristocrats such as Princess Michael of Kent and the fashion elite such as Mario Testino. However, behind this false shared appearance Isabella was once again deeply disturbed by inability to have children. After the couple tried eight times with IVF, Isabella, tortured, checked herself in to the Priori Clinic, London. She describes this experience as her and her husband being “like a pair of exotic fruits who could not breed when placed together”. Perhaps this concludes her eccentric relationship with her unplugged romance as even after their reconciliation, Isabella still held an unearthed feeling of deep pessimism about her illnesses.

 



Blow had survived in London through doing a variety of odd jobs, an example being cleaning, in which she threw herself into the part with her typical character by sporting a handkerchief, knotted in its four corners on her head. She later moved to New York to take a course on Chinese art but eventually realised where her directions lay when she was ultimately drawn to fashion. Through her close friend Brian Ferry she blagged herself a job at American Vogue working for the infamously valiant Anna Wintour. It was here where she met artists Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol and married her first husband, Taylor. When she later returned to London in the eighties her exotic and extraordinary background made her the idol of the most fashion forward trendsetters. Blow stinted in several high class fashion establishments in the late eighties to nineties from Vogue, to Tatler to The Sunday Times Style Magazine. Blow later returned to Tatler as Fashion Editor in an attempt to “raise their game” with Isabella as their new global talent.