Isabella Blow, the iconic fashionista famed for her love of hats, killed herself by drinking 20 times the fatal dose of weedkiller while she was struggling to accept her fading celebrity status, an inquest heard today.

The fashion director of Tatler magazine had made several previous attempts to commit suicide - jumping off a bridge, ramming her car into a lorry and overdosing on tablets.

The stylist and fashion journalist, known for her love of bright red lipstick, had been suffering from a lengthy bout of depression when she died in May.

Mrs Blow was once described as one of the 20 most influential people in fashion, but had become a more peripheral figure towards the end of her career.

She began her career in 1981 as assistant to Anna Wintour, now editor-in-chief of American Vogue, before coming back to the UK five years later where she worked for British Vogue, The Sunday Times Style magazine and Tatler.

The funeral of Mrs Blow was as stylish as it was moving with the 350 mourners including the models Sophie Dahl and Erin O'Connor, the designers Jasper Conran and Alexander McQueen, the actor Rupert Everett and numerous fashion designers.

Initially it was thought that Mrs Blow, 48, had succumbed to the cancer, which had blighted her final years, but she was still in remission when she passed away.

Dr Ian Pennel, her psychiatrist, said that a string of episodes in her background lay behind her depression.

“There was the perception of her waning celebrity, her paternal grandfather killing himself after being acquitted on a charge of murder, the death of her younger brother in a drowning incident and the difficult early relationship with her parents and coming to terms with her father’s will that excluded her and her siblings in favour of a second wife,” he said.

On the weekend of her death she was hosting a small party at her Cotswolds mansion. She committed suicide by drinking half a pint of Paraquat weedkiller knowing her father-in-law had killed himself using the same poison.

Lavinia Verney, her youngest sister, said Mrs Blow began suffering with depression five or six years ago.

In that period she tried to take her life three times, jumping off a bridge in London fracturing her feet, ramming her car into the back of a lorry and taking an overdose of tablets in India, she said. “She would often say that she wanted to kill herself.”

In April this year she was admitted to Wotton Lawn psychiatric hospital, Gloucestershire, she was released three weeks later on May 3, three days before her death.

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