Shaken By The Hand

Born into an aristocratic heritage in 1958 Blow was the eldest child of Major Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton, a military officer and to his second wife Helen Mary Shore, a barrister. She was the grand daughter of Sir Jock Delves Broughton who had been trailed for the murder of Earl of Errol in Kenya, famously represented in the film ‘White Mischief’ in 1988. This murder was allegedly due to his beautiful and much younger wife having an affair with Errol while Delves Broughton fled to Kenya in his forties due to a gambling addiction. 

 Her ancestors had a strong connection with the Crown and Army, with her family acquiring Doddington Hall, Cheshire, providing Blow with great despair when her father only bequeathed her £5,000 and denied her his million pound estate. Blow had two sisters, Lavinia and Julia and a brother John, who when Blow was four, drowned at two years old in the family swimming pool. This terrifying experience changed the family dynamics within the household as Blows parents lost their only son. When questioned about her brother’s horrific death at such an early age Blow recalls her mothers extraordinary howl as they stretched the young boy out on the lawn. “My mother went upstairs to put her lipstick on, that might have something to do with my obsession with lipstick”. Few years later at the tender age of fourteen Blows parents separated and her mother left the household shaking each daughter by the hand. As the enormity of her brothers tragic death sank in the two daughters were packed off to boarding school by her father, the rather unpaternal man who she never got on with. The only member of Isabella’s rather disturbed family, whom she vaguely got on with, was her eccentric grandmother, who was an explorer, famous for eating human flesh in Papua New Guinea, Isabella called her ‘the cannibal’.

Isabella Blow recalls her fondest memory being of her mother, trying on her pink hat, a prominent recollection that she later explained directed her into the fashion industry. Yet she failed to realise this direction would haunt her with decades of incessive depression in later years.

Many people analysed Blows tragic depression as the repercussions of her tragic childhood experiences a significant example is that of her grandfather’s morphine overdose in a hotel which caused the family a severe loss of money. This lack of inheritance haunted her due to her addictive nature that craved glamour.