Design - Hadley Freeman takes her hat off to the eccentric muse who revived British fashion

Philip Treacy met Isabella Blow in 1989 - and the British fashion world became a brighter, sparkier, if not, ultimately, wealthier place. Isabella, or "Issy" among her coterie, is the aristocratically eccentric benefactress to the more outre members of the fashion industry and Britain's most famous hat-wearer. (She is the granddaughter of Sir Jock Delves Broughton, who was accused of the White Mischief murder.) But she is probably best known for looking a bit, well, odd. Unsurprising, really, as in many ways she embodies the evolution of the British fashion industry - a strange place at the best of times - over the past decade.

British fashion is now infamous for torn hems, one-legged trouser suits and graffiti-sprayed skirts, and for that you can thank the lady in the front row wearing the lobster hat. Isabella - who once wore that one-legged trouser suit to a show - cast away the 1980s influence of the flouncy, fluffy styles of David and Elizabeth Emanuel, Catherine Walker and other Princess Diana favourites.

A crocodile hat is not the likeliest trigger for a revolution, but when Philip Treacy, the milliner, presented her with the animalistic hat ("What a beauty!" she gasped) 13 years ago, Isabella discovered a new image (she hasn't been seen without a teetering Treacy hat since) and a new metier as a fashion talent-spotter. Her subsequent discoveries transformed the fashion scene in this country in the Nineties, throwing up designers such as Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan (who delighted her with his concept of burying his clothes in his garden), the pneumatic model Sophie Dahl and the photographer Jurgen Teller (speciality: tired waifs slumped in fields). The unusual became desirable in British fashion and the experimental, exciting.

In David LaChapelle's 1996 portrait, Alexander McQueen, dressed in a Tudor frock, is screaming joyously and holding a lit torch, while Isabella, behatted and silent, holds his train and does a merry skip. In the background, flames shoot out from a castle. The famous photo captures how Isabella supported the (often bizarre, and a little scary) rebels to destroy the old and start doing things in a new manner.

Isabella and her stable came along at just the right time, coinciding with "Cool Britannia" as Britain garnered a reputation as a breeding ground for creativity and experimentation. Now, proving that Britain always has a soft spot for a rebel, the Design Museum has devoted a reverential exhibition to Isabella Blow and her hats. As the title "When Philip Met Isabella" makes clear, it is not Treacy's headwear that is being celebrated here, but his friendship with Isabella.

But even more than her clothes or her influence on fashion, it is Isabella herself who attracts much of the publicity. At fashion shows, the paparazzi eagerly await her photo-worthy entrance, and she has become a popular interviewee owing to her pithy, and often merrily crude, quotes: "[My Pope's hat] is a penis. With a hard-on. Not that I would know what they look like . . . I haven't seen one for so long." McQueen once described her as "a cross between a Billingsgate fishwife and Lucretia Borgia". Visitors to the exhibition were staring at the video montages of Isabella swanning and swooping around in her own dream-world, totally ignoring the displayed hats. A fine example of style triumphing over style.

But who would wear a Bicorne Hat (an explosion of black chicken feathers)? Is she simply looking for attention? Apparently, not. According to Isabella, the hats are there for self-protection: "Fashion is a vampiric thing. It's the Hoover on your brain. That's why I wear the hats, to keep everyone away from me."

Hilary Knight's series of portraits capture her perfectly. Knight is best known for his illustrations of Eloise in Kay Thompson's children's books about a little girl who lives in the Plaza Hotel in New York. There is certainly something of Eloise in Isabella's enthusiasm, exuberance and inability to conceive of a world beyond her own gilded five-star walls, or to kowtow to its expectations. When she sported antlers to a lunch with Nicholas Coleridge, he reasonably inquired: "How are you going to eat with those on?" "Nicholas," she replied to her then boss, "that is of no concern to me whatsoever."

But Isabella has said that it is through Treacy's hats that her true personality is revealed: there is the Castle Hat, a silver hat topped with, yes, a castle, modelled on her family's "castellet" and another castle in Bavaria, making an apt mix of the traditional and the exotic; the Corkscrew Veil is a tiny cap with a veil that twists upwards, like an aroused tail that seemingly just doesn't know where to stop.

The problem with being very much of an era is what to do when it ends. That high wave of Cool Britannia has crashed spectacularly, and one-legged trouser suits no longer inspire the same enthusiasm. Many British designers (including McQueen and Chalayan) are now showing abroad. Isabella's decline came in 2000, when she was sacked as fashion director of the Sunday Times, allegedly for her inability to stick to a budget. Since then, she has begun consulting for various labels, including, rather implausibly, Dupont Lycra.

Similarly, McQueen is now owned by the Gucci group and Treacy designs hats for Marks & Spencer. It seems there is room for pragmatism in the world of UFO hats and dresses made out of newspaper. At the opening party for this exhibition, Isabella arrived in a McQueen corset and what looked like a red satellite dish sitting atop her nose. So there may be room for pragmatism, but only a little.

Hadley Freeman is a fashion editor on the Guardian

"When Philip Met Isabella" is at the Design Museum (020 7940 8790), Shad Thames, London SE1, until 27 October

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