Wallflower at the Orgy (14 page)

Bill Blass is no radical hero of the men’s-wear revolution. Unlike Cardin, who, in addition to creating his space suits, changed the shape of clothes to the fitted, updated Edwardian look that now dominates the market, or the Beatles, who managed to prove once and for all that dandyism and homosexuality did not necessarily occur simultaneously in nature, Blass has done nothing dazzling or extraordinary. The most explosive comment he makes about men’s wear is that ties will have to go—not this year, not next year, but someday.

“The only important thing about the Nehru jacket is that it opened up the possibility for the tie’s disappearance,” he says. “The wider tie has given the look a different dimension, but ultimately the tie will go. Men will use scarves or
something—a man needs something up around there to set his face off since he doesn’t use cosmetics. At least, not yet.”

His major policy statements are even less earthshaking: they concern subjects like brown (“Most men have brown hair and brown eyes and brown looks marvelous on them”), red (“Red is the most masculine color in the world”), and blue (“The blue shirt has been a boon to men with sallow complexions”). Although he has designed them, he does not think men will go all the way for maxi-length coats. On turtlenecks during the day, his view is: “Fine, in the country.” On turtlenecks at night: “Out! Never in. The only time I was interested in the look was in Cleveland, where I saw an elderly gentleman wearing one. He must have been very unsure of it because he wore it with a bow tie. He had my sympathy.” On he-and-she fashions: “Only for the young.” On the possibility of an androgynous society: “Not in the near future.” The nastiest remarks he makes are on the topic of the gray flannel suit. “I feel downcast in a gray flannel suit,” he said, “and I see no reason for anyone to wear one unless he’s a stockbroker or an undertaker.”

What is significant about Blass, however, is that his clothes appeal to a group of men who have hitherto been resistant to fashion change—a group which, in fact, includes the stockbrokers and undertakers, who can well afford to pay the extra premium for colorful, well-tailored, tasteful clothes but want nothing to do with ruffled blouses and love beads.

“I think all that exaggeration of costume dressing and kinky fashion was tasteless but it was a phase we had to go through,” said Blass. “Exaggeration isn’t what I’m after. The crushed velvet pants, the coats from Tibet, the jewelry, which I find particularly vulgar, had to come out so that the
poor drab gray-flanneled man would become aware that something had to change.”

“One of the reasons Bill’s clothes are so successful in towns like Dayton,” said Bill Flink, who heads the Blass men’s wear operation, “is that he’s very careful about how far to go.” Danny Zarem, head of Bonwit’s men’s department, adds, “Bill’s done for the American-English look what Paul Stuart’s men’s show did fifteen years ago. Paul Stuart took an accepted traditional look and updated it. They took the natural shoulder jacket and did it in interesting fabrics. They took the rep tie, which had always been done in dull navies and burgundies, and kicked it up. In the same way, Bill’s taken things men have always related to, like the English cut in suits and big bold Shetland plaids used in hunting jackets, and kicked them up without being silly. Everything he does smacks of country, breeding, and good taste.”

Taste is the word you hear most often about Bill Blass. Bill Blass has taste. No question about it. Taste, of course, is an intangible thing, but some of the tangibles that make his taste so impeccable include twenty-five perfectly tailored suits, three dinner jackets (one of them lightweight for dancing, the others heavyweight for just plain eating), several dozen pairs of shoes cut for his very own feet by Lobb of London, and twelve overcoats, two of them fur-lined. He has a valet named Hugh who serves tea complete with watercress sandwiches. When he goes to London, he packs only his underwear; when he lands, he goes straight to his tailor—Kilgour, French and Stanbury—and picks up the five suits he ordered on his last trip abroad. Bill Blass has taste. Wonderful taste. Everyone knows it.

The women of America first began to hear of Bill Blass
and his wonderful taste about nine years ago, when he became head designer at Maurice Rentner, Ltd., a prosperous Seventh Avenue house with a reputation for dressing the amply-proportioned woman. “Our 1959 collection was quite a shock to the buyers,” Eugene Lewin, Rentner’s chairman, recalled. “They came in looking for matronly stuff and we gave them Bill’s young look. It was like walking into a steak house and getting a Chinese meal. They ate it up.”

The Blass look for women was a luscious, soft, feminine look for evening, with loads of ruffles and lacy dresses, and an easy-to-wear, brilliantly colorful look for daytime clothes. Blass was a sketcher, not a tailor; his strength lay in his color sense—he became famous for combining checks with plaids and stripes with tweeds—not in his notions on shape. “I don’t pretend to be a Balenciaga or a Courrèges,” he said. “I simply want to make clothes for now.”

What gave Blass an extra boost in the fashion world was the fact that before long he became a Beautiful Person. A perennially suntanned bachelor who was good-looking and utterly charming, he was the first of the fashion designers to enter into what Marylin Bender has called “the marriage of fashion and society.” Blass, Miss Bender wrote in her book,
The Beautiful People
, “has the relaxed posture of a man whose major activity is clipping coupons.” It is a posture he manages to maintain while all those around him are buckling under stress.

At the dress rehearsal this fall for the Coty Awards fashion show, where Blass received a citation for his men’s wear, he stood backstage during what was clearly a crisis and listened blandly as an assistant told him there was no black shirt, no presser for the wrinkled suits, no tan sweater, no wooden hangers, and the wrong size raccoon coat. “And
someone spilled mouthwash on the rain hat,” Blass added calmly. “Don’t forget that.” A few weeks later, just before the press opening for his women’s spring collection, Blass, cigarette drooping, leaned against the dressing-room wall at Rentner while eleven models scrambled frantically for shoes. “Can you imagine?” he said, smiling. “One hundred pairs of shoes are not here.” He chuckled. “Can you imagine?”

Blass broke Seventh Avenue tradition by inviting his private clients to press showings, and as the models appeared, all the socially registered women
Women’s Wear Daily
includes among the Ladies—Missy (Bancroft), Chessy (Rayner), Mica (Ertegun), and Louise (Savitt)—would sit and gasp and whisper and applaud and mark down the clothes they wanted to order on long slips of paper. Then, at night, Blass, the debonair extra man who always knew which fork to use, would go to Missy’s or Chessy’s or Mica’s or Louise’s, or they would come to his East 57th Street penthouse and dine on the terrace among fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of trees.

“It was quite a phenomenon when it first happened,” said
Vogue
editor Carrie Donovan. “I remember saying to Louise Savitt about five years ago, ‘Louise, has he really made it?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and I’ll tell you something else. The husbands love him, too.’ ”

Said Mrs. Savitt, a young divorcée Blass frequently escorts, “Bill’s great thing about clothes was that he was the first designer to go out and lead the social life.” Another friend, Missy Bancroft, who was a Blass model before her marriage, agrees. “I used to work for some of the other designers,” she said. “They’d never
been
to Morocco. They
never
went to ‘21.’ Their clothes fit
nowhere
into your life. Bill
knows exactly what you need to wear. He’s been
everywhere.”

Bill has not been everywhere, but it does seem that way. He went to Acapulco and Marrakech before one went to Acapulco and Marrakech. He has followed the bulls through Spain and he weekends on an island in Maine. Once, a few years ago, he and a friend named Jerry Zipkin (whom
Women’s Wear
describes as Social Moth Jerry Zipkin) wanted to spend Christmas at a place they’d never been to and the only spot they could come up with was Miami Beach. Partly because of his extensive travels and partly because of a long-standing, somewhat uncontrollable Anglophilia, Blass occasionally speaks in a slight English accent. “He had an English phase,” explains Mrs. Savitt, “and years ago, when I was working at
Vogue
, I was told Diana Vreeland had once asked someone, ‘Tell me, what part of England is Bill Blass from?’ ”

As it happens, William Ralph Blass is from Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he was born under the sign of Cancer forty-six years ago, the son of hardware store owner Ralph Aldrich Blass and his wife, the former Ethyl Keyser. At the beginning of the Depression his father committed suicide; he and his older sister were raised by their mother. Following his graduation from Fort Wayne High School, where he played football and sketched for the newspaper, Blass left the Midwest for good—and fairly shudders when he thinks about it.

“Indiana?” he said. “It never happened. I never went back. It was for me almost as if the whole process of growing up was based on waiting until I could get out. Do you know,
down the street from me had lived a girl named Jane Peters who ended up in Hollywood as Carole Lombard. As a kid, I thought of her as a straw in the wind. I thought, ‘She got out. She made it. I can, too.’ Look, Fort Wayne is probably as attractive a place for a youngster to grow up in as any other small American city, but what can I say? I didn’t like it. I’ve known what I wanted to do since I was five years old. And you don’t, if you have aspirations to design clothes, talk about it in a town of that size. I felt like a prisoner released when I came to New York.”

Blass dropped in and out of Parsons School of Design shortly after arriving in Manhattan and went to work as a sketcher for David Crystal. Then he served for three years in the Army in a camouflage unit which included a number of artists who had volunteered, thinking they were in for a cushy enlistment. Instead, the unit was sent to Europe as a dummy decoy division. “It was a suicide mission,” said photographer Art Kane, who was part of the unit. “Our job was to come in, with rubber tanks and recordings of battle noises, inviting enemy fire after a unit pulled out.”

Blass still carries with him a cast-iron saltcellar owl he found while digging himself a foxhole during the Battle of the Bulge. Years later friends heard about it and—“Oh, my God, the owls I got for presents,” he said. “I can tell you after a while they became anything but amusing.” (In addition to his owl collection, Blass also has coffee tables full of netsuke tigers and horn cups and walls full of antlers and paintings, a few of them abstracts by Blass himself.)

If Bill Blass was ever a hick, no one can remember it. Even in his Army days, he had taste. “He wasn’t a typical Hoosier,” said graphic designer Ned Harris. “His uniform did
not look like anyone else’s uniform.” There was a reason: a week after enlisting, Blass had taken his dress uniform to Brooks Brothers and had it altered to fit.

Following his discharge as a corporal, Blass worked as a sketcher for Anna Miller; then, when Mrs. Miller merged with her brother, Maurice Rentner, Blass went over as second designer. He is now vice-president of Rentner, which grossed 4.1 million dollars last year, and president of Bill Blass, Inc., a licensing firm that handles his business dealings with manufacturers who hire him to design luggage, swimsuits, men’s wear, and other products. This year Blass’s business manager estimates he will earn a quarter of a million dollars from his combined efforts.

In the early sixties, when designer names began to appear on manufacturers’ labels and American designers became celebrities of sorts, Blass began making extensive public appearances around the country with his models and clothes. “He’s a superbusinessman,” says New York
Post
fashion editor Ruth Preston. “He can sell the eyelashes off a hog.” Some of the other designers traveled, but few went at it as relentlessly as Blass. “Anyone’s a damn fool to think it isn’t important to go on the road,” he said. “New York is not America. New York women are fickle about designers. But if Sarmi comes to Minneapolis and tells someone she looks sensational in green chiffon, that lady will be Sarmi’s forever.”

Several hundred thousand miles and three Coty Awards later, Bill Blass has become a household word—“Almost as well known as Dior,” says Bonwit’s president Mildred Custin. Nothing did as much for Blass as a series of AT&T advertisements, picturing a group of models in fluffy Blass
dresses, surrounding the designer. The caption read, “Fashions by Bill Blass. The Trimline Phone at Your Bell Telephone Company.”

Publicity seems to fall Blass’s way without his lifting a finger: the AT&T people came to him; so did the Haig-Pinch bottle ads, showing a group of identified Beautiful People surrounding an unidentified Blass. And then there was the time when Jean Shrimpton posed for a Revlon ad in an antique white Chantilly lace dress by Blass. Minutes after the lipstick placard hit the drugstores, the Revlon switchboard lit up with calls from women demanding to know where they could buy the dress. Rentner sold sixteen hundred of them, at $160 and $225, thus making it the best-selling, most publicized dress in Seventh Avenue history.