This Oscar-nominee is playing Isabella Blow in a new fashion biopic

As reported in Deadline, Academy Award-nominee Andrea Risebrough is taking on the role of Blow, and will be joined by Game of Thrones actor Emilia Clarke as Blow’s close friend Daphne Guinness, with up-and-comer Fionn O’Shea starring as Treacy. Previously, Riseborough has played American socialite Wallis Simpson in W.E., bagged an Oscar nomination for 2022’s To Leslie, and taken on starring roles in Birdman and Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals.

Elsewhere in The Queen of Fashion cast, Richard E. Grant is set to play Evelyn Delves Broughton, Blow’s blue-blooded father, while Hayley Atwell is playing former British Vogue editor Alexandra Schulman. More key roles – including Blow’s protégé McQueen – will be announced shortly.

The new film is described as a “long-gestating biopic” of Blow’s time in the spotlight, one that “details the ups and downs of [her] life championing unknown and marginalised fashion figures.” Though details on particulars are scant, this will probably include Blow’s discovery of McQueen and subsequent purchase of his entire 1992 Saint Martins graduate collection, plus her social milieu in 80s New York that included Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The film will likely focus on Blow’s mental health battles too, ones that saw her struggle with infertility and a bipolar diagnosis, which eventually led to her suicide in 2007.