She was one of fashion’s most luminous personalities, influential, extravagant and never without an outlandish hat. Yesterday the world of fashion paid tribute to Isabella Blow, the renowned fashion director of Tatler who has died of cancer, aged 48.

Credited with starting the careers of Alexander McQueen and Philip Treacy and a host of other designers and models, she was famed for her boundless enthusiasm and originality as a stylist. In private however, she suffered from depression, and had tried to commit suicide on several occasions. Her husband, Detmar Blow, told The Times that she died in Gloucestershire Royal Hospital yesterday morning.

Anna Wintour, the Editor-in-Chief of Vogue, led the tributes, calling her “a free spirit that really believed in individual talent”. It was as Wintour’s assistant that Blow began her career in fashion in 1981.

Wintour told The Times: “In a world that’s largely driven by corporate culture she was a joy to have. She was not too good at getting to the office before 11am, but then she would arrive dressed as a maharaja or an Edith Sitwell figure. I don’t think she ever did my expenses but she made life much more interesting.”

Blow was said not to own a single pair of flats and could never recall wearing jeans, even in private. Asked whether she owned any casual clothes for lounging in front of the television, she could only remember wearing a white feathered cape to watch a David Attenborough programme.

She wore the clothes of the designers whom she discovered. In 1989 she saw a hat in green felt by the milliner Philip Treacy, then a student at the Royal College of Art. She helped to begin his career and ever after wore his hats on all occasions – hats that looked like lobsters, a castle, an 18th-century sailing ship, and one that resembled the head of David Beckham.

Wintour said: “She was always calling me and saying, Anna, you have to come to the farther reaches of some dark East End club to see some artist who she thought was the Second Coming.”

Geordie Greig, the Editor of Tatler, remembers Mrs Blow staging a photoshoot close to the border of Kuwait during the first Gulf War. “She was without doubt one of the great figures of fashion of the 20th century.”

Michael Roberts, the fashion editor of Vanity Fair, recalled working with Blow at Tatler in the 1980s. “She was like an exotic bird,” he said. “Issy was living rather like Diana Vreeland, the legendary fashion editor of the 1950s. She seemed to be trying to translate styles of the 1950s and 1960s to modern life in a dull office in Hanover Square. At times it could be difficult for her. Life tramples on people like that.”

Mr Blow, whom she married 15 days after meeting him, told The Times: “She was the most extraordinary person and a powerful force in the world of fashion. She had money worries like all artists. She suffered depression. She said to me once, ‘I’m fighting depression and I can’t beat it.’

“She once called the National Trust and found out where Virginia Woolf’s house was, intending to end her life there. She rang me up and said that the river didn’t have any water in it.”

Last year she broke both her ankles after throwing herself from a bridge on to a motorway. A friend said that she feared that she might never again be able to wear her beloved Manolo Blahnik shoes.

Mr Blow said she had been “a ray of sunshine”. He likes to remember her in the words of a friend: “There is nothing in the Tate Modern which compares to Isabella wearing a hat.”

Points of view

On Indian fashion “I see a whole lot of potato sacks. There is a long way to go”

On redecorating her house “We’re going to have glass sculptures made especially for the hats and the furniture is coming from a countess’s palazzo in Venice. I’m going to have a bath shaped like a gondola that will be filled with Egyptian chocolate. It’s very good for the skin”

On hats as an alternative to plastic surgery “You don’t need the knife and anaesthetic. I just shove on a veil and look fabulous”

On Elizabeth Hurley “I know that she doesn’t understand fashion. She wore a dress with safety pins on it and became a fashion phenomenon. She was nothing before that”

On being a muse “It’s like having a baby”

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