The fashion industry will never know her like again.
A Tribute to Stella Tennant, a Unique Spirit, and My Friend
“Stella came off the train from Scotland smelling of goats,” Isabella Blow chortled down the phone to me. It was the summer of 1993 and Stella Tennant had been scouted for the December British Vogue “London Babes” story to be shot by Steven Meisel. The portfolio was being orchestrated by Isabella Blow and stylist Joe McKenna and they were searching for striking bluebloods with Meisel-level allure. The wide-eyed, gangly young writer Plum Sykes had also been enlisted on the hunt and remembers the “tiny little passport photo” that was submitted to Isabella, of Stella with her septum ring. “She was remarkable looking,” Sykes recalls, “she came in and she was just so incredibly cool that I was intimidated. She was so level headed and not vain, she wasn’t grand, she was just this really cool beautiful country turnip.” Sykes continues, “She looked like a model but was very grounded. She just looked amazing in a boiler suit—she had that incredible glamour.” “She had a nose ring—quite rusty—and it was very frightening,” Isabella Blow told me, “She reminded me of a farm animal. I can take hard tailoring but a hard look is something else—I was terrified! Her beauty was in her eyes—she was absolutely wild, like a wild bird, a tomboy who’d never worn a dress.”
Stella was also the bluest of blue-bloods. Her mother, botanical artist Lady Emma Cavendish, was the daughter of the 11th Duke of Devonshire and his wife Deborah “Debo” Devonshire, the youngest of the fabled Mitford sisters who was famously droll and beautiful and whose entrepreneurial flair transformed Chatsworth, the Devonshires’s storied family estate, into one of Britain’s great tourist destinations. Stella’s father, Tobias William Tennant, meanwhile, was the son of the 2nd Baron Glenconner, and younger brother of Colin Tennant, the 3rd Baron Glenconner, who bought the Caribbean island of Mustique with a youthful inheritance and transformed it into the playground of rock and real royalty. As an insecure teenager, Stella recalled a visit to her eccentric aesthete uncle the Honorable Stephen Tennant who had been a noted Bright Young Thing and a celebrated beauty himself in the 1920s. “The nose!” he shrieked as his great-niece walked into the bedroom where he had retreated to spend decades working on Lascar, a fanciful novel about the maritime boulevards and randy sailors of pre-war Marseilles that he would never finish, “The nose!” Stella, highly self-conscious, blushed crimson, worrying what was wrong with her nose. “Ah yes,” her great uncle continued, “... they always said I had the most beautiful nose.”
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Hamish Bowles
