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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
I never bought a piece of clothing by Bill Blass, although I inherited one of his down coats from my mother. It was a shapeless bed sack of reversible two-tone gray cotton, ash on one side, slate on the other, and there is nothing better for walking the dog on a frigid morning. Blass was a great dog lover. Indeed, the only slobbering he could tolerate--he had a horror of effusions--was that of his adored retrievers. I'm fairly sure, however, that Blass himself didn't design that coat, at least, I hope not. It was among the merchandise that he licensed for production and ennobled with his signature, not always with impeccable discrimination--jeans, luggage, chocolates, linens, eyewear, a backgammon set, and, perhaps best known of all, a Lincoln Continental. He consulted with the maker about color schemes, even though he candidly admitted that he'd never tested the product personally. He couldn't drive.
The man behind the label, a patrician by affinity, was an autodidact of considerable culture and disarming humility. I have heard admiration for his character expressed by a surprising cross-section of New Yorkers--surprising because the disillusionment with the rich that followed the Reagan decade, during which Blass was a frequent guest at the White House, and the more recent falls from grace of so many posh felons haven't tarnished him. "There was nothing ersatz about the Blass style," said a friend of mine, a downtown architect who voted for Ralph Nader in the last Presidential election. "In that respect, it reminds me of Cesar Pelli's World Financial Center. Neither Pelli nor Blass is a visionary, and in both cases the work celebrates money and power, but somehow you don't hate it. I think it's because they represent a republican rather than an imperial image of capitalism. It's not the Wall Street of junk bonds and boiler rooms. And it's not the fashion Disneyland of Ralph Lauren. Blass looked like the president of an old family bank--someone you would trust with your life savings."
The Blass family didn't have a bank, or even much of an account at one. To understand desire, one has to be, or remember having been, hungry, and perhaps that is why the history of fashion has mostly been written from the outside in--not by scions of the ruling class but by provincials shaking off the dreariness of their milieu. Worth started out as a shop assistant. Chanel, who grew up in an orphanage, was the bastard daughter of a peddler. Paul Poiret was a draper's son. The father of Adrian (a Mr. Greenburg) made hats for the matrons of Naugatuck, Connecticut. Mainbocher, ne Main Bocher (his names rhyme with "plain" and "rocker," not "elan" and "cachet") worked briefly as a wholesale florist in Chicago. And then there is Bill Blass. Those two clubby monosyllables are as crisply percussive as the slapping of a jib in the breeze off Hobe Sound. Yet "Blassy," as he was known to his school friends, grew up in a middle-class house with a singularly hideous brick porch next door to a costume-rental company in Fort Wayne, Indiana. A favorite treat was a white-bread sandwich of cold, leftover mashed potatoes with...
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