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Fashion It girl Harriet Verney

WHEN the much-missed Isabella Blow was fashion director of Tatler, she ‘discovered’ the celebrated designer Alexander McQueen and milliner Philip Treacy, as well as the models Sophie Dahl and Stella Tennant.

Now, the society magazine’s new editor-in-chief, Richard Dennen, is hoping Issie Blow’s niece, Harriet Verney, will prove similarly influential.

I can disclose that Dennen, whose first edition comes out later this month, has appointed Harriet, right, as his fashion features editor.

‘She’s just the right mix of East End cool, fashion heritage and aristocracy,’ one of her friends gushes.

Harriet, 25, grew up at Hilles, the Arts and Crafts house near Painswick in Gloucestershire, built by the grandfather of Isabella’s husband, Detmar Blow.

Harriet’s mother, Lavinia Delves Broughton, is Isabella’s sister and her father, Harry Verney, is a lumberjack.

They divorced when she was small, so she and her brother and mother moved to the Blows’ estate.

Troubled Issie, who suffered from depression, died in 2007 at the age of 48 after poisoning herself with weedkiller. ‘Harriet is the daughter Issie never had,’ claims a pal.

A regular at London’s very trendiest parties, sharp Harriet is no ‘air head’.

Although she was expelled from the £29,000-per-year boarding school Westonbirt, she went on to create her own magazine, set up an online shop and star in an independent film by the age of 19.

Before Tatler, she was online editor at Love Magazine.

She seems to share her aunt’s eccentric sense of style. Harriet once recalled: ‘Issie would pick me up from school in those amazing hats and then my mum would arrive in a U.S. army boiler suit.’