The Pictorial Tribute

Countless tributes have flooded in for the death of Isabella Blow earlier this year.  I’ve read at least 15 articles in various magazines (not just fashion ones!) recounting her life, paying homage to this ‘muse/style guru/fashion eccentric/true original’ (the various tags that she has been given and she was certainly all those things and much much more).  However perhaps the best tribute would be to big up her work, seeing how her mind worked creatively and what that produced.  In the fall issue of Pop magazine (they used a different LiLo cover to what I thought they were gonna use, which is even cooler..), the editor Katie Grand saw fit to re-publish Isabella Blow’s first ever piece of styling work for The Face magazine.  I guess this is a double mourning tribute since both Blow and The Face are sadly deceased.

Collaborating with the photographer Sean Ellis who chose Isabella Blow to style this shoot.  He saw her as a bit ‘Vogue-ite’ and was eager to see what she could bring to an edgier publication.  Apparently, they weren’t even sure whether she was still working as she hadn’t been in the fashion scene for 3-4 years and her first reaction to the shoot was ‘What would you want to do with an old fogey like me?’ 

This veers onto controversial subject matter but I guess where Issy is concerned, you can’t really be reined in by conventions.  The editorial ‘A Taste of Arsenic’ was inspired by a BBC newsreader at the time arrested for taking pictures of her daughter in the bath from which Blow and Ellis, spawned a Lord of the Flies idea, a world without adults where ‘innoncence is left unadulterated and becomes this strange and beautiful thing.’  The intended style references for the models aged between 7-14 (a time before the underage model took place…and I’m personally glad for it as I don’t think the shoot would have worked with older models…) being Victorian photos of their ancestors.  So the results are these made-up dolls that have a savage edge from being left to their own devices.  So started a two year working relationship between The Face and Isabella Blow.

I think I like to remember her by this type of work rather than the Vogue-ite stuff (though she did quite wonderful things for a stuffy rag like Tatler…) as it tip-toes around the edges of insanity whilst still maintaining certain notions of beauty or at least, those notions are pushed to the limits…   

(‘A Taste of Arsenic’ was published in The Face September 1997 and here is republished in POP Fall 2007 – 10 years on and the images are still relevant….)