I started following fashion in the 1990s and writing about it in 2000, and in that era the British scene was defined not by a look but by a clique. Kate Moss was the queen, of course, and floating around the heart of it were Alexander McQueen, Isabella Blow and Annabelle Neilson. The first time I went to a McQueen show I saw them all there: I thought how glittering they were, brittle with glamour and self-consciousness, eccentric and fabulous, fun if you were part of their gang, which I very much was not. I stayed in the shadows, literally and metaphorically, and watched.

As a teenager I was obsessed with biographies of 1920s aristocrats: the Mitfords, the Coopers, the Guinnesses – those groups of people who flitted through history like photogenic Zeligs, friends with everyone and invited to every party, beautiful and often damaged. They always had perfect taste; even if their lives were falling apart they maintained “a good shop front”, as Nancy Mitford put it. Standing backstage, looking at Moss, Neilson, Blow and McQueen, it was as if I’d tumbled into one of my books.

That was almost two decades ago. Today, Moss is the last one standing. Blow killed herself in 2007; McQueen killed himself in 2010; and earlier this month it was announced that Neilson, only 49, had been found dead in her home in London – a heart attack, her sister told reporters.

For those of us who circled the fringes of the British fashion world in the early 21st century, it is shocking to realise that three of its once most influential figures are gone. McQueen and John Galliano may be the most famous names of that era, but Blow and Neilson exemplified the maxim about great men requiring great women behind them. Blow, a gentle woman and true English eccentric, was one of the great star-spotters of her era. She was a muse to the designer Philip Treacy and discovered Hussein Chalayan and McQueen, a working-class boy from Lewisham, whose entire graduate collection she bought. It was Blow who introduced him to the aristocratic Neilson, who became his muse, and the three were a trio. “‘I’m an East End boy,’ ‘I’m a toffy aristocrat,’ ‘I’m a mad woman,’” as Neilson later jokingly referred to McQueen, herself and Blow respectively. It was one of those brief periods in British culture when class barriers seemed utterly porous.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Galliano, Alexander McQueen and Annabelle Rothschild in Monaco, 2000. Photograph: Richard Young/Rex/Shutterstock

Neilson was close to Galliano, but it was McQueen with whom her life became most intertwined. She had a bedroom in one of his houses and they described themselves as “a married couple – without the sex”. Moss, the schoolgirl from Croydon, became part of their crew, she and Neilson planning McQueen’s wedding to his then partner George Forsyth. A decade later, Moss was photographed holding Neilson up at McQueen’s funeral.

It was easy to see what McQueen liked about Neilson: she had the kind of boldness only the most privileged are blessed with, and would wear his all-but see-through designs to high-profile parties. But their connection was much more than mere PR: he supported her through an acrimonious divorce, and she was there for him when his mother died. “People who have been hurt are like wounded birds flocking together. He thought I was more vulnerable than he was; he used to call me his princess,” Neilson said in an interview after McQueen’s death.

The group often flirted with suggestions of doom: the skull was McQueen’s signature motif; the theme of Moss’s 30th birthday was “the Beautiful and the Damned”. Then, it looked both glamorous and childish; today it looks prescient and sad.

There is nothing new about party people burning out young, and many from that generation have died: Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Matthew Mellon. But instead of dismissing such deaths as the result of too much partying, what if the partying itself was understood as an expression of their vulnerability? Because this was an exceptionally vulnerable group. Blow was bipolar. McQueen had been sexually abused as a child. When she was 16, Neilson was tied to a tree and brutally attacked for two hours. The same man went on to murder three other women, and Neilson, deeply traumatised, turned to heroin. “A lot of people, John [Galliano], Lee [McQueen], me, have had things happen that you don’t want people to know about, so you live in a shell, in a bubble, to protect yourself,” Neilson once said.

None of them protected themselves very well, though they tried to maintain a good shop front. Today, even the survivors seem battered. Galliano, once a high-profile showman, has stayed out of the limelight since 2011, when he was filmed drunkenly slurring antisemitic abuse. Moss, who rarely comments about anything, posted a photograph of herself and Neilson on Instagram last week, one taken when they were young and happy and having fun. Underneath was a broken heart emoji. It felt like an insignia for that once glorious era of British fashion, and a shattered group of friends.

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