Annette Sharp: Fashion tsar Dan Single is home alone — without his muse Bambi — after Paris tumble

Dan Single’s Go Fund Me plea for help with hospital bills was the final straw for his ‘mortified’ model wife Bambi Northwood-Blyth.

• Single’s plea for cash to fund Paris hotel fall recovery backfires
• Dan Single and Bambi Northwood-Blyth’s marriage on the rocks?

FRIENDS of one-time fashion bad boy Dan Single say the surfer-turned-fashion-tsar is broke and blue following his tumble from a third floor Paris hotel window in March.

Single returned quietly home to Australia on the eve of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia in May after spending weeks in a coma and two months in a Paris hospital.

Missing from his side on his return was his model wife, Bambi Northwood-Blyth (born Stephanie Northwood-Blyth), his constant playmate, muse and collaborator for the
past nine years.

Bambi Northwood-Blythe and Dan Single last year. Picture: Christian Gilles

Two weeks ago Single denied he and his wife of three years have split.

“I’m working on my recovery so I can get back to Stephanie overseas,” he said.

But close friends believe Northwood-Blyth has ended the relationship — the final straw in the troubled union being Single’s decision to set up a Go Fund Me page to pay mounting Paris hospital bills that now stretch to six figures.

Northwood-Blyth, whose Melbourne family is well-off, is understood to have been unhappy with Single for soliciting funds to pay his hospital and rehabilitation bills as well as to finance “early flights home, being unable to make bread and work over the next months and all the incedentals (sic) the family is covering at the moment”.

“Bambi was mortified Dan would ask his friends and the wider community for money — particularly given their somewhat ostentatious lifestyle over the past decade,” one said.

The model is also said to have been concerned the backlash might find Single’s 10-year-old son Justice, his child from his earlier relationship with Sydney stylist Pip Edwards.

Northwood-Blyth has become close to the boy she has known since he was a toddler.

While Single recuperates on Sydney’s coast, Northwood-Blyth is back in France and hard at work having spent the northern spring modelling in Vienna, Amsterdam, Ibiza and Italy.

Single and the girl he fell in love with when she was 17 to he was 30 were staying at the Hotel Grand D’Amour in the fashionable Pigalle district on March 11 when the fashion impresario fell and “somersaulted” from a window to the street 35m below, landing on his feet and smashing every bone from his heels to his pelvis.

Single is recuperating in Sydney, while Northwood-Blyth is back in France working.

They fell in love when she was 17 and he was 30. Picture: Instagram

He maintains he fell from the window but insurance investigators called in to examine the incident declined the Ksubi jeans founder’s claim.

Compounding problems with an insurance claim was the fact Single had no travel insurance — investigators examining the claim were working on behalf of the Northwood-Blyth’s insurance company, this column has been told.

The trip to Paris had been organised to coincide with Paris Fashion Week.

The couple had planned to seize the opportunity to shoot a promotional film for their burgeoning P. Jame sleepwear collection and the Paris collections offered a vibrant backdrop.

The Grand Hotel Amour in Paris. Single fell from the third level.

Single has much riding on P. Jame — essentially a sleepwear range he hoped might restore his fashion cred and revive his career after being banned in 2013 from running a company for three years for trading while insolvent.

After triumphant beginnings with jeans brand Tsubi in 1999, Single and co-founders George Gorrow and Gareth Moody changed the name of the brand in 2006 to Ksubi following a trademark dispute.

In 2007 the brand enjoyed turnover of $19 million but a year later the company was running at a loss of $7 million and was unable to repay creditors leading to it entering into voluntary administration in 2010.

When Single’s directorship ban ended last year, he went quickly to work on P. Jame but the range struggled to make early deadlines.

Dan and Bambi with visiting international model Winnie Harlow at the P.Jame show at The Ivy, in Sydney.

Despite much anticipation the collection did not appear on the official schedule at Australian Fashion Week (a hastily organised off-schedule party merely raising eyebrows) while a much-hyped website for the range failed to make its launch date and was later criticised for featuring too few pieces with fewer actual design elements.

Single, 39, is now being cared for by his father.

Friends say his once irrepressible spirit, the quality that most defined him in the fashion game, is much diminished, worn down by a painful physical recovery and sudden change of glamorous circumstances.

On March 21, in her last Instagram post referencing Single, his wife attempted to again inspire him: “Dan keep on being the amazing fighter you are … You got this!!!”