Coming to blows over late fashion icon Isabella Blow

She did stripteases at funerals, wore couture to breakfast and had a talent for discovering fashion genius. Isabella Blow's life was one of flamboyance, hilarity, brilliance and tragedy. So, is it any surprise that in the wake of her suicide, three books, two films and a documentary are vying to tell the truth about London's greatest eccentric. So who's telling the real story, asks Vassi Chamberlain...

Two weeks ago Detmar Blow, the lawyer turned art dealer husband of late fashion icon Isabella Blow, threw an intimate party at The George & Dragon pub in Hackney to celebrate the publication of Blow by Blow, his account (co-written with journalist Tom Sykes) of his wife's life and death. The book, which reads as if it was written at speed (probably to beat the rush of other titles on the same subject due out soon) takes in Isabella's aristocratic childhood, her life in fashion, her discovery of designers Alexander McQueen and Philip Treacy, as well as models Sophie Dahl and Stella Tennant, her struggle with depression and her eventual suicide in May 2007.

Considering Isabella's love of old-world glamour, considering she revered Wallis Simpson's polished chic and dressed for breakfast as if going to a ball, the pub seemed an odd choice of venue. 'There's going to be a party at Annabel's,' Detmar told me in his campy voice on the grubby pavement outside among the fag butts, 'but this is more Issie.' The East End DJ and writer Princess Julia and the artist Sue Webster both read extracts, but something didn't quite feel right. Where were Daphne Guinness (who recently bought the contents of Issie's wardrobe just as they were about to be auctioned at Christie's), Lucy Ferry and Blow's beloved sisters Julia and Lavinia? Where were Philip Treacy and his boyfriend Stefan Bartlett? Where was the singer Bryan Ferry? None of her closest confidantes or any of the fashion stars she had helped to create were present, and that alone marked it out as not very Issie.

That Isabella Blow would leave a lasting legacy – she died in the early hours of 7 May 2007 in a hospital in Gloucester (the result of ingesting the weed-killer Paraquat) with her sisters by her side – was never in doubt. But it would most probably have settled down sooner or later to one of fashion-student idolatry were it not for another tragic and unexpected suicide. Alexander McQueen, her greatest protégé, the man with whom she had a close but volatile relationship and whose life she changed when she bought his entire Saint Martins graduation collection for £5,000 in 1995, was found dead in his Mayfair flat in February this year. He had hanged himself. Those close to McQueen were quick to cite his adored mother's death (only days previously) as the trigger. This was certainly the case but among his inner circle it was also acknowledged that deeper down was his unrelenting sorrow over the loss of Issie. 'What I had with Isabella,' he had said, 'was completely disassociated from fashion, beyond fashion.'

It was thanks to Isabella's patronage and to his prodigious talent that McQueen rose to become one of the world's most gifted designers, one who will take his place in the fashion canon alongside Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent. But despite his success McQueen never chose to recognise Isabella's role by formally employing her. It was only after she died that he dedicated one of his shows to her. 'The role of a muse is changing,' Issie once said. 'Traditionally, we haven't been paid, but as Bryan Ferry once said to me, one should be paid for ideas as well as the physical manifestation of them. If Alexander uses some of my ideas in his show, and he has, I don't get paid; he does.'

So, in the wake of this double fashion tragedy, we now have three books, a Channel 4 documentary and rumours of a couple of films all vying to give their account of Isabella's life. The first is Detmar's (whose girlfriend Mara recently gave birth to his first child, a boy). He was keen to make public his personal recollections about life with Issie. It's entertaining, including anecdotes such as her impromptu striptease at Andy Warhol's wake, but it's a quick, light read and it feels narrow in scope. The next is a beautiful coffee-table compilation of drawings, letters and photographs put together by one of Issie's last assistants, Martina Rink, with a foreword by Philip Treacy. But it's the final book, by journalist Lauren Goldstein Crowe (author of The Jimmy Choo Story), which is likely to be the most contentious and the most interesting.

'Detmar was not at all happy that I was also doing a book,' says Crowe. 'He chose not to participate, which is a shame.' 'She came up to me at a couple of parties,' recalls Detmar. 'I wished her well and walked off.' Despite Detmar's non-cooperation, Crowe has spoken to over 100 people including Lucy Ferry, Isabella's old friends Geraldine Harmsworth and Natasha Grenfell and her stepmother, Rona. Crowe calls into question Isabella's take on her inheritance: 'Isabella claimed that she was only left £5,000 by her father, but she also had a trust fund,' she says. The book also considers whether McQueen mistreated her. For example, when Crowe asks Domenico de Sole (then CEO of the Gucci Group which owned the Alexander McQueen label) if he would have offered Isabella a £50,000 contract had McQueen asked him to, he replies that he would. As for Detmar, when asked what he makes of the other books and films, he welcomes the Rink/Treacy collaboration as 'a very lovely tribute and a complement to my book' but about Crowe's book he is more scathing. 'I think it'll be a lightweight cut-and-paste job. What is it based on? I was Issie's husband, I lived with her for 18 years. I have my memories, my diaries, my conversations with Anna Wintour. I lived with Alexander McQueen. I was there. I find the idea of someone else writing about my wife a bit strange. But there are a lot of people jumping on the Issie bandwagon.'

Daphne Guinness's gesture in July of buying Isabella's entire wardrobe, which was going under the hammer to settle debts after her death, has added to the drama. 'They [her sisters] didn't want to have the auction, but they had to, and I talked to a lot of people about whether I should do it, because I didn't want to look greedy or grand but I had a sick feeling when I found out where the clothes were headed,' she has said. Her move was a joint homage to Blow and to McQueen, many of whose clothes were included in the sale: 'I know he would have been horrified with the auction. This is Issie's art. This is her body.'

In all of this, one thing's for certain: Issie would have adored the fuss, snorting with laughter at being the centre of attention, although her one regret would have been that once again others were lining their pockets thanks to her. Not that she would have hung on to it for long – she had a knack for spending money like it was going out of fashion. Issie's failure to capitalise on the success of any of her protégés fuelled her often-aired anxiety of one day ending up like a bag lady on the streets, something that concerned her more and more as her depression took hold in the run-up to her death. She was well paid by magazine standards and she was given lucrative consultancy contracts by companies such as Swarovski and MAC, but she longed for more than just being the tiresome woman continually hustling for work and free clothes. Was she truly hard-done-by or was she too volatile and too skittish to employ? Probably both. 'Actually,' says her sister Julia Delves Broughton, who was recently presented with a rose by the Royal Horticultural Society that McQueen had specifically chosen and named 'Alexander's Issie' in her honour, 'my sister was too generous with her contacts, her time and her nurturing.'

Until she joined Tatler in the autumn of 2002 (where I then worked) I only knew the public persona, caricatured frequently in the press as 'the mad one in the hat'. Complicated and beautiful hats (almost always by Philip Treacy) were not just fashionable accessories but also devices to shield her from the unwelcome air-kissing of people she didn't know. There was another reason – the hats created a distraction. 'It pains me to say so,' she said, 'but I'm ugly. I know that's subjective, so perhaps I should say instead that I'm striking. My face is like a Plantagenet portrait.' But her extraordinary clothes could also sometimes distract those who didn't know her from her wit and intelligence. She was always well-read and perceptive, often assessing people more accurately than they could themselves. My most enduring visual memory of her was the day I saw her sitting with her back to me in our then-editor's office (now editor of this news-paper). She looked demure enough in black but when she stood up and turned round she was in a see-through chiffon highwayman's outfit complete with mask covering her face. She saw the look on my face and roared with laughter.

So despite her supposed physical insecurity, she adored, even invited, attention and was so loved by the staff in the mailroom at Vogue House that even during the years when she didn't work in the building, her photo was kept on permanent display above one of the franking machines. She had a laugh like a madam's, filthy and pornographic; and she loved visiting the boys and telling them dirty stories about her mad escapades around the world. Equally, she would regale the Tatler staff, it didn't matter who, anyone would do, with stories of her sex marathons with a Venetian we all referred to as Casanova or 'the Gondolier' and who she had started seeing while on a year-long separation from Detmar in 2003. (They got as far as a 'decree nisi' before reconciling.)

'We didn't need to go to the theatre as children,' says Julia, 'we had Issie at home to entertain us. She was very brave in all ways, very courageous.' The sisters were brought up at Doddington Hall, the family's 35,000- acre estate in Cheshire, by their father the military officer Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton (son of Sir Jock Delves Broughton, the man acquitted of the murder of Lord Erroll, also known as the White Mischief case which rocked Kenyan society in the 1940s) and their mother Helen Mary Shore, a barrister. But family life was far from idyllic. First came the accidental drowning of their two-year-old brother, John, and then the news that their parents were to divorce. Both events clearly had a profound effect on her as she repeatedly brought them up as reasons for her sadness.