How my Issie was ‘betrayed’ by McQueen

Any suicide is freighted with psychic violence — blame and guilt. People have criticised him. Erstwhile friends now don't speak to him. Lucy Ferry, for instance, the socialite former wife of Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry, now married to club owner Robin Birley, hasn't forgiven him for allowing Issie to have ECT treatment and to be admitted to a bleak NHS mental hospital, which she loathed.

Julia, Issie's youngest sister, is co-operating on a biography that Blow suspects will not flatter him. Rachel Cooke, an Observer journalist, has accused him of "cashing in" on his wife's death. "I have even been criticised for having a child with Mara. But Issie would not have been made happy by me being unhappy."

Mostly, he says, it is because people don't understand. "People who are lucky enough not to be haunted by sadness don't see the sadness in others. They saw Issie larger-than-life, taking her top off at parties, they thought it was fun." Blame, as he says, is just a way of avoiding reality.

Alexander McQueen was a key figure in Issie's life. He came to her funeral, sitting behind Blow but never speaking to him. "He had hated me ever since we separated. He used to tell Issie, If you go back to him, I will never give you any money'." But McQueen's face said it all. "I have never seen anyone so devastated," says Blow.

Inside Issie's coffin McQueen placed a letter he had written, to be cremated with her. Earlier this year, almost three years later, at the age of 40, he hanged himself.

It is not easy to dissect from the story how much McQueen really owed to Issie but clearly she thought he owed her a lot. And when this wasn't forthcoming, she had a deep feeling of having been wronged.

She was clearly enormously talented with a desperate creative urge but, like Zelda Fitzgerald, whom she resembles, she never found an art of her own — an outlet for her creativity.

Her talent was for recognising talent and her two greatest protégés were the hatmaker Philip Treacy and fashion designer McQueen, whose work she championed having spotted his talent in 1992 at his graduation show at Central St Martins.

In the beginning, she and McQueen were in it together, even sharing a London house. But gradually Issie was outstripped by her prodigy.

In 1996, when he ascended the world fashion stage as Givenchy's designer, she hoped for a paid place by his side. But McQueen, it seems, thought that friendship was strained by hard cash and gave her nothing.

McQueen changed, Blow says. "Money changed him and then drugs changed him." In 2001, he sold his company to Gucci for millions — again, there was nothing for Issie. She had just lost her job at The Sunday Times. "I remember reading of how he had flown his boyfriend somewhere for £130,000," says Blow. "What did Issie get? Some clothes. I find that quite shocking."

Money was important to Isabella. She loved to be the mistress of the big house. "It was in her blood, she came from a family with big estates."

When I asked him what he thought she saw in him, he said: "The house in the country, a house in Belgravia — both owned by my mother, in fact. But it was the kind of exotic background she loved."

Time went on, there were setbacks in Issie's career, then suddenly Blow's mother wanted the London house, in which they had been living, returned to her. Gradually Issie's growing sense of financial insecurity compounded her fragile mental state. Blow tells me that often he would say to her: "If you find a rich man to look after you, I will not hold you back."

Blow ought to have been that rich man. As a boy he had grown up in Hilles, the beautiful Arts and Craft house built by his grandfather.

His father — an unsuccessful writer — was an alcoholic and a depressive. Blow, according to his sister, became a "surrogate husband" to their mother. As he says: "The more my father collapsed, the more she depended on me." His father killed himself, with paraquat, in fact, when Detmar was 14, dying in his son Amaury's arms — "Amaury is still traumatised by it." As is Blow, who has kept the bills for both suicide purchases of paraquat. "My father £20 in 1977. Issie £83 in 2007."

So Blow became the man of the house — the child forced to grow up too fast. No wonder he longed for someone to protect him. No surprise, either, that he exudes this strange mixture of vulnerability and strength.

He was the eldest of three but always "a loner". Selina and Amaury "were a pair", they had a bond, from which he felt excluded.

Because there was little money to run such a big house, his mother dismissed the help and the children were drafted in to polish the floors. "We were the unpaid staff." It was from all of this that Isabella was supposed to release him.

And for a time clearly she did. She took over the running of Hilles — ordering fridges, hiring cleaners, sorting out the heating and wiring.

"She was hugely practical." And once it was done she would invite glamorous house guests — "Life became very exciting." There were photo-shoots and exotic holidays, one in Marrakech where they spent time with actor John Malkovich. Regular guests included Treacy and, of course, McQueen.

Detmar could not attend McQueen's funeral in February this year. He was in Lisbon with Mara and Sasha, writing his book. But he lit a candle to the designer. And at the end of the writing he had changed, he says. He is composed, he feels comforted. "Less arrogant, less frivolous. I love my life."