I was walking down a corridor of the Tatler office one day when my nose started twitching like a golden retriever’s. What was that overwhelming scent, so repellent and yet seductive too? It smelled of anarchy and dissent; a dissolute glamour.
Then I heard a vigorously aristocratic voice coming from the fashion closet. I walked in and there was the Valkyrie herself, our newly arrived fashion director, Isabella Blow, reclining on a chair, her legs up on a desk, wearing Manolo Blahnik heels and a Philip Treacy highwayman’s black tricorn hat complete with a Zorro-like mask. She was cackling uproariously at something droll she’d no doubt just said; a lit cigarette dangled from her violently red lips. “Who are you?” she asked, holding up a bottle of Fracas, by French perfumer Robert Piguet, in her bony, etiolated hand. “Would you like a spray?” she asked. I proffered her my wrist.
It smelled of anarchy and dissent; a dissolute glamour.
For the next four years, Fracas became the most potent sensory memory I have ever associated with another human being. Blow died in 2007, but whenever I catch a whiff of it, it never fails to remind me of all the crazy days and nights we spent working and carrying on together, on shoots or during Fashion Weeks in London, Paris, and Milan.
Fracas has always been the trademark of broken birds—Marilyn Monroe wore it (when she wasn’t soaked in Chanel No. 5), as did Brigitte Bardot, Courtney Love, and Bianca Jagger. It never fails to announce the wearer, to define her spirit and vim, which is why I could never have thought of owning it myself. It would have felt sacrilegious. My proximity to Blow meant I was always metaphorically drenched in it. Whenever I lost her (which was often), I’d follow the trail of tuberose and jasmine-scented breadcrumbs she scattered in her wake.
For all her bluster and outlandish getups, Blow was a troubled soul whose mental health veered between manic euphoria and total despair. I remember once we were at her best friend Alexander McQueen’s fashion show in Paris. They’d had a row backstage and she was in pieces. She’d discovered him when he was still a student, and she never felt he gave her the respect or the due she deserved. I’d lost her in the fray and needed to get her into the car to go to the after-party at Maxim’s. I followed the trail and eventually found her slumped in a gigantic clothes box, sobbing.
When she took her own life, in 2007, Fracas was sprayed at her funeral in Gloucester Cathedral. We were bereft, but Fracas consoled us. Not long after, McQueen (who took his own life two years later) dedicated a show in her memory, leaving a bottle as a memento on the chair of every attendee. Mine sits on a bathroom shelf at home, a constant reminder of that impish maven I was so lucky to have known, the scent of those decadent breadcrumbs never far away. I occasionally spritz it around my house and imagine her sitting in front of me, wearing some outrageously fashion-y confection and laughing like a drain.
Vassi Chamberlain is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL
