Yes, we’re all waiting to see Ellie Bamber transform into an aughts Kate Moss for Moss & Freud, but there’s also another deeply nostalgic, fashion-filled biopic about a much-mythologized industry legend that you need to have on your radar: the upcoming tale of the thrillingly eccentric stylist and editor Isabella Blow.
Titled The Queen of Fashion, the forthcoming film will be helmed by Alex Marx, who has been developing this feature debut for over nine years. And starring as the style maven? The Oscar-nominated British actor Andrea Riseborough, best known for her roles in the likes of Birdman, The Death of Stalin, To Leslie, Lee, and The Regime.
Per the log line, the film “details the ups and downs of Blow’s life championing unknown and marginalized fashion figures like Alexander McQueen, Philip Treacy, and Sophie Dahl, whom she catapulted to success while struggling with undiagnosed bipolar disorder.”
Born in London, Blow moved to New York in her early 20s to study at Columbia before dropping out and relocating to Texas, where she worked for Guy Laroche. In the ’80s, she returned to Manhattan and was hired as the assistant to Anna Wintour, then the fashion director of Vogue US, and went on to assist André Leon Talley. In this period, she befriended Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, among other New York luminaries. In 1986, she came back to London to work for Tatler’s Michael Roberts, and began wearing Treacy’s outlandish hats, even letting him use her London flat to work on his collections. She also discovered McQueen, buying the renegade designer’s entire graduate collection for £5,000. She went on to become Tatler’s fashion director.
Blow had struggles with depression and was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder, for which she received electroshock therapy. She also battled ovarian cancer. In the final years of her life, she attempted suicide several times, and eventually took her own life in 2007, aged 48.
Joining Riseborough in this decades-spanning true story will be Stacy Martin as her childhood friend, the socialite and fashion muse Daphne Guinness; Richard E. Grant as her father, Evelyn Delves Broughton, with whom she had a difficult relationship that led to her being disinherited; Normal People’s Fionn O’Shea as Philip Treacy; and Michelle Dockery as former British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman.