A TRAGEDY IN THREE HATS
Hat No.1
It was the colour that first aroused the curiosity of the six-year-old girl's beady eye. That pink candyfloss colour framed within the shell-shaped crown and brim of the round, oval object.
Little Isabella approached it initially with caution, inspecting the hat with her fixed, bird-like eyes from every angle around the edge of her mother's bed before eventually reaching for it, picking it up with her hands and holding it up so the morning light could illuminate the details of its fabric. She had already seen her mother inspect hats before, placing them on her head like a Monarch.
Standing on a footstool to get a good look at herself in her mother's dressing mirror, Isabella had an immediate sense of attachment to the hat as if it was the missing jigsaw piece of herself that she had been looking for all along without realising what it was exactly she was seeking. Admiring the way it sat on her head, she felt instantly emboldened by the addition of it in a way one might imagine a knight of old would have done with his suit of armour.
Many decades later she thought back to that defining moment when she first fell in love with a hat and how she wasn't to know of the strange superstition that it was bad luck to find one on top of a bed. She didn't dwell on the unsettling thought for long but it bothered her that she would consider the thing that gave her the purest of pleasure could be tarnished by a curse.
Hat No. 2
It was to be the first hat Philip designed for her and it had special significance as it would be for her wedding day, joined in matrimony to one Mr Detmar Blow at Gloucester Cathedral.
She'd requested a medieval-style headdress for the occasion and the hat designer duly obliged. Was it this same sense of being emboldened by her hat armour that she had had that time as a six-year-old girl? A sort of fashion reinforcement to steady her nerves on that momentous day.
It was true that on each occasion and event where she wore a new hat. She felt a connective tissue of time between the memory of all those hats she'd worn previously as if it had finally become one timeless ritual. Perhaps, then, this was why she loved Royalty so much: the overt symbolism attached to clothes, jewelry, and millinery.
But even with this fairy tale wedding perfectly co-ordinated, the fashionista could not help but feel as if an invisible Carabosse was watching her and waiting to descend with her witchy darkness and prophecies of tragedies to come.
Hat No.3
The 'Black Ship' sailed, not on waves but on a mannequin's head atop a bed of white roses resting on the dark wooden frame of the coffin in which the muse of fashion lay beneath in her eternal sleep like one might imagine Snow White. She had been poisoned, not by an apple but by paraquat.
The symbolism of this final, deathly, fascinator was exquisite and closed the book on this Queen of Hats with a solemn finality, as if to say there will be no other like me.
Strange to think, then, of a journey that began trying on her mother's pink hat in her bedroom and ended with this black magnificence, navigating a voyage into the infinite.
The transience of the fashion world is often as fragile as flowers and as fleeting as a typical British summer. Embracing eternal youth and generally avoiding any spectre of death or mortality, is often a tightrope walk between blissful ignorance and ostentatious flamboyance.
Isabella brought the shadow of death into the world of fashion and, along with the tragic suicide of her friend Alexander McQueen, left a ghostly impression that has remained ever since like Carabosse herself watching from the shadows.