An eccentric who championed many of this generation’s designers and models, Isabella Blow was a pioneering stylist and fashion maverick.

She was born Isabella Delves Broughton in London in 1958, into a family with its own eccentrics. Her paternal grandmother, who remained an important inspiration to Blow, once claimed to have eaten part of a tribesman in Papua New Guinea in the 1930s and listed herself in Who’s Whoas a cannibal. Blow’s grandfather, Sir Henry “White Mischief” Delves Broughton was an alleged murderer who committed suicide by injecting himself with heroin.

Blow’s early years were an unremarkable mix of schooling at Heathfield, a secretarial course and odd jobs, working in bakery and then as a cleaner in London for two years.

In 1979 she moved to New York to study Ancient Chinese art at Columbia University. A year later she abandoned her studies and moved to Texas where she had her first taste of fashion, working for the French designer, Guy Laroche. In 1981, thanks to an introduction from her friends Bryan and Lucy Ferry, Blow met the fashion director of US Vogue, Anna Wintour. The two bonded over a mutual appreciation of the poet and novelist Vita Sackville West, and Wintour made Blow her assistant. She quickly moved on to organising shoots and, gaining a vital peek into the lives of the famous and creative, Blow soon befriended Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, with whom, it was rumoured, she and Wintour were both in love.

In 1986 Blow returned to London to become the assistant to the fashion director of Tatler and The Sunday Times, Michael Roberts. From 1993 she spent four years at British Vogue, where she produced features such as the famous London Babes shoot, in which Steven Meisel photographed Honor Fraser, Stella Tennant, Bella Freud and Plum Sykes in various locations around London. Blow went on to become the fashion director of The Sunday Times Style Magazine in 1997, and, in 2002, the fashion director and then contributing fashion editor-at-large of Tatler.

A stylist first and foremost, Blow exploited her position and influence to open doors for many young designers and models. She introduced Sophie Dahl, whom she referred to as “a blow-up doll with brains”, to the Storm agency in 1996; she spotted the beautiful faces of Honor Fraser and Stella Tennant and introduced the design talents of Hussein Chalayan. But her most famous discoveries were the milliner Philip Treacy and the fashion designer Alexander McQueen.

Blow first saw Treacy’s talents while she was working at Tatler in 1989. A green felt hat, cut to look like crocodile teeth, arrived at the office and Blow was so impressed she immediately called the Royal College of Art, where Treacy was the only student of millinery, and asked him to make her wedding headdress. She provided the struggling student with space to live and work in the basement of her own house in London.

Blow offered the same space to McQueen six years later, when she bought his entire collection after the Central Saint Martins graduation show in 1995. She paid £5,000, which she could ill-afford, in weekly instalments of £100.

Five years later she brokered the sale of McQueen’s label to Gucci. She claimed that she told Tom Ford to buy the label and told McQueen that Ford fancied him. Blow also introduced her treasured milliner to her now favourite fashion designer, and the two have collaborated ever since. Treacy and McQueen remained loyal in providing suitable attire for a woman who liked to dress with drama and extravagance.

Blow’s first memory of trying on a hat was as an eight-year-old struggling under the weight of an enormous pink creation owned by her mother. It pained her to say so, but Blow admitted she was ugly, or as she once described it, an alien. Wearing hats was, as she put it “a cheaper and less painful form of plastic surgery”.

The Alexander McQueen veiled antlers she wore for lunch with Nicholas Coleridge, managing director of Condé Nast, prompted concerns about how she was actually going to eat.

Other hat favourites included “the Pope”, which boasted an erect penis; “the Matador”, which she wore with a black snakeskin corset to her godson’s sports day; the encrusted lobster she wore to a Julien Macdonald show and “the hat with 100 veils”, made for Blow when she attended the funeral of a cousin, designed to absorb her tears. Treacy’s “Pheasant” hat is the one she wanted to be buried in.

Her own clothes were no less fantastical. There was the one-legged trouser suit, the flesh-coloured, see-through dress, and perhaps the most memorable, the Joan of Arc, complete with a heavy oiled chain, which she dragged behind her as a symbol of the burden of woman. Apparently, she visited Karl Lagerfeld while wearing this outfit and left stains on the cream floors of his Parisian home.

Blow took her fashion inspiration from many sources. She loved Wallis Simpson, because she always took sandwiches to her dress fittings; inspired by this, Blow once threatened to turn a Louis Vuitton handbag into a lunchbox. She also admired Nell Gwyn, Charles II’s mistress, mainly because of her low-dipping necklines. In short, Blow admired anyone who as she put it “‘makes a bloody effort”.

One of the reasons she was so keen on McQueen’s designs was because they pushed and pulled her slim size 8 figure into the ideal hourglass silhouette. According to her, McQueen was the master at simultaneously flaunting and containing a bosom. Her sister, who worked at Christie’s, thought there was sometimes too little containment and once escorted Blow out of the auction house because she felt that the amount of cleavage on show was inappropriate.

Blow did not have an easy time with men. Her father, Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton, ran off with another woman and all but disinherited Isabella. He was a wealthy man whose estate was £6 million, and it was a shock for Blow to be left only £5,000 when he died in 1994. He was disappointed with her choice of career, apparently, convinced that Tatler was a magazine for drug dealers.

Blow married her art dealer husband, Detmar Blow, after being engaged barely a fortnight in 1988. During their turbulent 18-year marriage the couple spent much time at Hilles, Detmar’s 1,000-acre Cotwolds estate.

It was at their jointly owned gallery, Blow de la Barra, in 2005, that Isabella launched the limited edition red lipstick that she produced in collaboration with MAC cosmetics. Named Blow, it was inspired by a bougainvillea flower she saw while staying with Bryan Ferry in St Barts. Being a chain smoker, Blow also insisted that the lipstick be matte.

Constantly in a rush, Blow knew that her brutal pace of life made “fashion a killer”, as she said. She started designing storyboards and visual plans for each day during the fashion week season to ease the stress.

In 2002 Blow was the subject of an unusual and successful exhibition at the Design Museum in London, which featured many of the most memorable hats made for her by Treacy. A book by Treacy, When Philip Met Isabella, featuring photographs and sketches of Blow in some of her most outrageous and memorable outfits, was launched at the same time. The exhibition toured to Venice, Bilbao, New York and Las Vegas.

Despite her obvious achievements, Blow remained a troubled person and was dogged by rumours of depression. It was said by friends that she found it difficult to reconcile having helped a lot of people to make a lot of money with not seeing any of it herself.

Blow is survived by her husband, Detmar.

Isabella Blow, fashion stylist, was born on November 19, 1958. She died of cancer on May 7, 2007, aged 48