On Blow by Blow

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Poignant comment from reader Visione on Eric Wilson's post re: Blow by Blow, the Isabella Blow biography written by her widow Detmar Blow. On the complex relationship between Isabella and Lee Alexander McQueen: "Like Issy, Lee McQueen was also a person whose balance was perpetually threatened: by bleak depressions, huge surges of manic energy, amazing humor and grim, deathly sorrow, by passionate love and emptiness. When two such personalities meet, it is explosive. Often creative and filled with life, their friendship must also have been fraught with fear and jealousy and neediness. I do believe that, until his own end this year, McQueen loved Issy, in his way—in the way of an artist—which is to say he loved in a complex and fraught manner. I suppose words had been spoken in public and private that could never be taken back, never explained. Instead, the weight of regret and abandonment hung between them like a dark curtain, occasionally pierced by memories of the olden times." [On the Runway]