Daphne Guinness will exhibit her Blow collection on line and at the London art college
Daphne Guinness has let it slip that she is to Exhibit Isabella Blow’s Wardrobe at Central St. Martins, part of the University of the Arts and Online later this year. It is part of an awareness raising, for her new Mental Health Foundation which takes the name from the muse of Alexander McQueen and the milliner Phillip Treacy.
Guinness purchased the collection following Blow’s tragic death, to prevent it from being split up and auctioned off. Ms Guinness revealed, to the journalist Charlie Rose that she plans to make Blow’s beloved wardrobe a monument for good works that will highlight mental health issues. Rose recently hosted a discussion about the state of fashion with Diane Von Furstenberg, Suzy Menkes and Guinness. For the most part, Guinness appeared shy and didn’t say much–Menkes was the most loquacious–but she did share a couple of interesting tidbits. Adding on to a discussion about how the digital revolution is changing and democratizing fashion, she said, I’m going to put together a show of my friend’s clothes and I’m going to do that online so that people in New Zealand can see it because they might not be able to get to Central St. Martins to be able to see it.
Rose, who understandably thought Guinness was talking about her other dead friend, interrupted: “So if you did not know the clothes of Alexander McQueen, you can now…” Guinness corrected him–that it was Isabella Blow she was referring to–and also revealed that she’s planning to start her own foundation that sounds like it relates to both of her fallen friends:
“I’m making a foundation which will hopefully help mental health because I want to get to the bottom of all of this and also to take it back to Central St. Martins where it all began. But not everybody’s going to be able to see it, so to do a sort of online museum would be the ideal thing, because there’s so many sort of fanatics that want to see her things”.
By “getting to the bottom of all this,” we assume she’s referring to Blow’s and McQueen’s decisions to commit suicide, which surely had a major collective impact on her. We love the recent trend of online museums and exhibitions and think it will be a perfect way to remember both Blow and McQueen in an enduring, wide-reaching way.
Isabella Blow was a fashion editor, consultant, muse and nurturer of young fashion talent. She was renowned for her extrovert dress sense, which sometimes involved little more than a fur coat, red lipstick and a hat. To many she was the embodiment of the English eccentric. She was renowned for her unique ability to spot and nurture design talent, she discovered many of the fashion industry’s leading figures. Three years after discovering Treacy, she attended the Central Saint Martins MA graduate show where she spotted the work of then-student Alexander McQueen. Blow famously bought McQueen’s entire graduate collection for £5,000, and began supporting him and his talent in any way she could.