Every time you see a photo of Isabella Blow she’s wearing a silly hat and lots of lipstick.

Not that I follow her taste in barnet-lids to any great length, but you’d think someone who wears dead peacocks on her head must be an authority on something. When she speaks, people sit up and take notice. They even take notes. I mean, imagine Iain Duncan-Smith eulogising on the Blue’s new asylum seeker strategy with a plastic bowl of tangerines balanced on his balding pate. Fashion? Well maybe, but you’d definitely listen: and you’d remember him next time, too.

So when Isabella Blow endorses a New Wave Fashion, Kookai have it in spades the week after. If she says jump, the hoi-palloi ask what off. And if she says Liverpool’s cool, people nod knowingly as though they knew this all along. She wears dead peacocks on her head, for crying out loud, so pay attention.

In her recent Tat (ler) article, a glossy paean to the achingly hip elite, Blow proclaimed why Liverpool’s the place to be: the people; the clothes; the music. And the weather? Well, it ain’t quite the Riviera, but does the place even come close to her utopian fawning over our little part of the North-West?

Is she right to fly the flag – and with that hat on, does she have any right?

So look around Liverpool these days and it’s changed. All of a sudden things are being built. New things. Lots of things. Glass things and brick things. Okay, so mainly houses and flats, but the scale of growth has been unprecedented. The mantra of city living has been adopted by housing agencies and the likes of Urban Splash. Shopping is still a bit limited, lots of people still wear bad tracksuits and Liverpool isn’t yet at the culinary epoch that London enjoys, but it’s riding a renaissance that is attracting enviable looks from other parts of the country.

Liverpool has lived long with a certain Scouse stigma; that is, if wasn’t tied down someone would nick it. An endemic caricature embodied by the likes of Harry Enfield and turned in a pseudo-Greek tragedy with elements of Ealing farce by everyone at Brookside. And adding ambassadors like Lily Savage, Atomic Kitten and Sonia, you had to wonder was there any hope?

Coming to the city a few years ago with derelict buildings in abandon and fashion caught in Lacoste stasis, it was a wonder that anything could change, short of razing the entire place and starting from scratch, sans accents and fake tans, avec be nice to your neighbours. It was always grey and raining, a sense of malevolence permeating from every clutch of yoofs congregating en masse on every street corner, and there was the overriding feeling that, no matter who you were and what you did, you never really felt that welcome. Or safe.

So which Liverpool did our ‘Bella see? I have walked these streets and seen some eye-opening sights. I just can’t imagine Tatler’s editor (let’s call her Tamarama) waving a glib affirmative to Blow’s messy doctrine on what’s cool here, no doubt written on the back of a fag packet on the (first class) train home. Would she have been swept away by the movers and shakers clad in shiny shoes and neatly-pressed shirts pole-axing each other on Slater Street over an orange woman on an energetic Friday night? Would she have been bowled over by the architectural delights of Granby and Toxteth? Would she have been woman enough to tackle shopping in the city centre on a Saturday – wearing that hat?

I am not convinced that Isabella knows what she’s talking about. Certainly people want to listen, though, eliciting a sell-out of said magazine in every shop in town. Great for every coffee table. She christened it Livercool. Clever, huh?

The point is, I think she latched onto Liverpool being a groovy place, probably having heard about it in passing. Liver-who? The north? Perish the thought. Now, though, we must accept and be grateful for her thumbs-up. Nice one love. Good on you.

There are many more authorities on Liverpool than me. This much is true. Yet I also feel slightly more qualified than ‘Bella to comment on why. Recently we have been nominated as for the 2008 Capital of Culture. To win the Capital of Culture would mean massive revenue for the city. You can see the aforementioned effort already: nice buildings, trendy cafes, cobbled streets and the like. Glasgow was the last place to win it on these hallowed shores. Glasgow! They received over £1 billion in filthy lucre, and many thousands of jobs were created. Everyone rejoiced and probably sang in the streets: it’s that kind of place. The benefits for whoever gets the gong are absolute.

It doesn’t matter what Isabella says. Arguably it doesn’t matter what I say either, but anyway, I think Liverpool’s cool. And we need to win the Capital of Culture. I mean, have you noticed why all of the students come to the city for three debauched years? It’s 'cos it’s so  cheap to get wrecked. But come graduation, everyone’s away before the last silly gown has been packed away. No-one wants to stay here after because there’s not much to stay for. The job prospects are pretty poor, and that’s why it would be nice to become the Capital of Culture, making Liverpool not some transitory educational port but a city that people wish to stay in for years to come – the prospects then would look so much better.

We all know why Liverpool’s cool. We don’t need some silly woman to tell us. It could be better, yes, but in just the last few years it’s started to head in the right direction. We can all help to push for the bid and, if we win, I for one will be rejoicing in the streets. Hell, I might even sing.