Events planner and florist Robert Isabell died of of an apparent heart attack on Wednesday. He was only 57. Isabell was a genius whose events were known the world over for their unique and creative touches. He was found Wednesday in his Greenwich Village townhouse.
The cause was a heart attack, said Alex Folger, a lawyer who is one of the executors of Mr. Isabell's estate. The club owner and hotelier Ian Schrager, a friend, said he had seen Mr. Isabell on Saturday in the Hamptons and that Mr. Isabell had left at about midnight to return to Manhattan, but that no one had seen or spoken to him after that.
Mr. Isabell was an events planner before such a thing was common. He was known for imagining an occasion in its entirety — the flowers, of course, but also the location, the decor, the lights, the table settings, the sound — and in the eyes of many of his clients, his skills amounted to artistry. Among the style-conscious, fashion-conscious, glamour-conscious and status-conscious, Mr. Isabell was considered, in the words of Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, "the king of the event world."
"He was the first one that all of New York society went to for a wedding, for a gala, for a private party," Ms. Wintour said in a telephone interview Friday. "If you could afford him he was a magician. All the great society hostesses — Pat Buckley, Annette de la Renta — used him, and because they used him, all the others wanted to use him."
Afraid of neither simple elegance nor opulence, gifted with both taste and creativity, he used them all in the service of the joyous, the somber and the playful. He worked on Caroline Kennedy's Cape Cod wedding to Edwin Schlossberg in 1986 and John F. Kennedy Jr.'s wedding to Carolyn Bessette on Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia in 1996. He worked on the funerals of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1994 and of her friend the horse breeder and philanthropist Paul Mellon in 1999.
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One New Year’s Eve in the late 1970s, he trucked four tons of glitter into Studio 54, where it carpeted the floor four or five inches deep.
"You felt like you were standing on stardust," said Mr. Schrager, who, with Steve Rubell, opened the club in April 1977. "People got the glitter in their hair, in their socks. You would see it in people's homes six months later, and you knew they'd been at Studio 54 on New Year's."
For the Clinton White House, he created a giant noble fir wreath with 1500 lights dipped in blue gel. For Marie-Chantal Miller to Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece he recreated a Greek temple. He was a true design genius. Our condolences to his family and friends.
