FREE BLOW BY BLOW: THE STORY OF ISABELLA BLOW PDF Detmar Blow,Tom Sykes | 304 pages | 15 Sep 2011 | HarperCollins Publishers | 9780007353132 | English | London, United Kingdom Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow by Detmar Blow My library. Books on Google Play. Account Options Sign in. My library Help Advanced Book Search. View eBook. My library Books on Google Play. Detmar BlowTom Sykes. HarperCollins Publishers Limited- Celebrities - pages. A life of extreme tragedy and remarkable inspiration, the story of Isabella Blow is a dramatic and compelling tale of a courageous icon. Isabella Blow was the epitome of English eccentricity. A legendary figure in the fashion world, she nurtured and championed the talent of some of fashion's most recognisable and important figures, all the time hiding her own personal unhappiness and severe depression. The news of her tragic death inaged 48, shocked the international Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow world. But she is perhaps best-known for the iconic images of her in Philip Treacy's hats, the first of two designers to launch his career Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow the basement of Isabella and Detmar Blow's house. With similar passion and verve, Isabella enthusiastically displayed her admiration for young designer Alexander McQueen, buying his entire first collection after he graduated from Central St Martins, in a move that many believe launched his career. Detmar Blow was engaged to Isabella sixteen days after they first met inand the couple remained married until her death. In this visually stunning portrait, Detmar and Tom reveal the truth about the intriguing world of Isabella, providing incredible behind-the-scenes insight into the world of fashion and high-society, as well as tracing her ancestry and early childhood, offering a fresh and penetrating look at her domestic life, and celebrating her incredible achievements. Bibliographic information. Blow by Blow accounts | Financial Times Isabella Blow, the fashion stylist with a penchant for loony hats and a talent for discovering the Next Big Thing, died on 7 Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blowat the age of 48, having drunk a quantity of Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow weedkiller paraquat. Two days later, on 9 May, I was dispatched by this newspaper to Hilles, her Gloucestershire home, to interview her husband Detmar Blow, with whom I have a passing acquaintance I used to work with Issie at the Sunday Times ; Detmar was a regular visitor to the office. This wasn't an easy encounter — he was tearful and slightly manic — but it would have been unfair of me to have done anything other than give him the benefit of the doubt. He had suffered a terrible loss. In spite of my better instincts, then, I attributed his weirder comments to grief, and made light of the fact that, midway through our conversation, he lunged at me with such force I ended up lying prone on a sofa, his soft bulk flapping, carp-like, on top of me. I even failed to contradict him when he insisted that Issie had died of cancer, though like everyone, I knew that, months before, she had thrown herself off a flyover, smashing her ankles, and condemning herself to a life of oh, horror! Three years on, and I rather wonder why I bothered. The more I read of Blow's new biography of his wife — I use the word loosely; this book is to biography what a jar of Chicken Tonight is to cooking — the more convinced I was that his inappropriate behaviour on that day was not remotely unusual. Blow by Blow Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow not be more inappropriate if it tried. It's not only that it is so blatant an attempt to cash in, though he was obviously in a tremendous rush to get it out: the thing is so pockmarked with inaccuracies, I failed to be surprised even when he described his wife's eyes as bright blue I believe he was right the first time, when he told us they were green. No, it's his tone — whining and solipsistic — that is most repulsive. Detmar is the sort of chap who would once have been described as a milksop; when Issie met him in he was 25, but so close to his mother he used to shop for her sanitary towels. Given that he found even part-time work exhausting — in his book, he is forever off on holiday to recover from his shifts as a solicitor — you can probably guess how he coped with Issie's mental health problems. In Blow by Blowhe flips between sickly self-pity and a weird kind of pride, as if he has landed the best role in a particularly juicy melodrama. There is, for instance, something perturbingly gelid about the satisfaction with which he describes the jacket he wore to visit his wife on her deathbed "punk Harris tweed with a Rhodesian flag on the back and an Umbro label on the front", since you ask. All of which is a terrible shame, because Issie's story is a fabulous one. Detmar writes of a Delves Broughton curse, which might be Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow it. But still, Jock, having been acquitted of the murder of his wife's lover, poisoned himself in the Britannia Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool. Issie was fascinated by this. More horrifying, when she was five, her baby brother John drowned in the family pool. The story Issie liked to tell was that her mother had left Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow children to go and apply her lipstick — which is straight out of A Handful of Dust — but Detmar disputes the veracity of this: Issie, too, could be self-dramatising. She and Detmar met at a wedding. By then she was already a minor legend in fashion circles, famous for flashing her breasts and being a friend of Andy Warhol. Detmar proposed 16 days later. Their engagement photograph, in which Issie is dressed like a medieval page, complete with ceremonial axe, and Detmar is sounding Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow kind of horn, makes me cry with laughter every time I look at it. What did she see in him? Her own family having been forced to close up their ancestral home, Doddington Hall, Issie had an obsession with grand Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow, a fixation matched only by her preoccupation with money. Perhaps she thought Hilles would help clear her overdraft. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Detmar goes on about how broke they were — grand estates being not at all the same thing as capital — but it's hard to sympathise when you find that they can nevertheless afford to snap up a flat in Eaton Square. Ultimately, Issie's profligacy grew to be another symptom of her manic depression, but it wasn't so in the beginning. Money simply passed through her fingers like sand. Her supporters claim she was badly treated by her most famous discovery, Alexander McQueen; when he landed the big job at Givenchy, he could find no paid role for his "muse". But really, what could he do? Erratic doesn't even begin to describe her methods. If she felt like it, she worked from her bed. Her husband, from whom she was estranged towards the end, takes the reader through her various jobs, at VogueTatler and the Sunday Times. He details her IVF treatments her failure to conceive may, he speculates, have contributed towards her depression. There are some good anecdotes — Issie once cleared a first-class rail carriage by telling everyone how her "combine harvester" teeth Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow her from giving oral sex — though laziness his own and his co-writer's means the best stories are cut short before they even begin. What, for instance, actually happened when she joined the Prince of Wales at a house party? The mind boggles, but he can't be bothered to find out. However, the crime for which he really cannot be forgiven is his total failure to pin Issie to the page, to breathe life into her for the benefit of those who never met her. How did he render one so flashy so dull? Perhaps I'll have a go myself. In some ways, she was a monster. She was dismissive of anyone she considered to be unimportant or — worse — uninteresting, and her "eccentricity" was more of a put-on than she cared to admit. If you ask me, she never forgot that she had a lobster on her head, or a satellite dish. Then again, in full sail, she was a wonderful sight: Rod Hull's emu as styled by Salvador Dali, a human triffid who smoked Benson and Hedges, who never wore underwear and whose touchstones in life were good jewellery and high birth, and not a lot else. She was filthy and funny and ridiculous. She was born in the wrong time. I cannot quite believe that she really existed, much less that I once shared a desk with her. The desk was grey, but the woman who sometimes deigned to visit it seemed to be permanently aflame, a dazzling heap of feathers and fur and leather. We laughed at her, but a tiny part of us was in awe. No one else was going to earn the Murdoch shilling while wearing a lampshade on their head. The Observer Fashion. The late fashion muse Isabella Blow could never be called dull — so why is her husband's portrait of her? Rachel Cooke.