Christmas Island Fashion Pearl Wedding Jewelry 89

Christmas Island Fashion Pearl Wedding Jewelry.

By Aamir Mannan 

The exhibition is a biography, in clothes, of a woman who once said that the mood-altering effect of hats was better than antidepressants, but who took her own life. Fashion was the great love of Blow's life, the focus of her passion and talent – but towards the end, she felt that the designers she had nurtured had left her behind. This is an exhibition with a very clear agenda: to give Blow the place in fashion history that she deserves. Driven in large part by her friends Daphne Guinness and Treacy, the show gives Blow a posthumous third act. In other words, this is not just hats, it is the backstory of modern British fashion being rewritten.

Did you know, for example, that in 18th-century France there was a fashion for elegant women to wear model ships in their hair, to celebrate French victories over the English at sea? I didn't, until I learned from the caption accompanying the "galleon" hat that it was this story, told by Isabella to Philip Treacy, that inspired it. Blow had a wealth of knowledge about history, and about the countryside and nature – she was a great lover of gardens, and roses – and a knack for plucking out colourful titbits with which to feed her proteges. Blow told her own story in hats: her fondest memory of her mother, who famously offered her 14-year-old daughter a formal handshake on the day she left the family home, was being allowed to try on her pink hat. The story she liked to tell about meeting her husband Detmar Blow began with him complimenting her hat.

It is a story about the power of fashion – and its limitations

Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore!