Bill Blass: the dressmaker's son who dressed America

1922-2002

The Fort Wayne start: William Ralph Blass was born on 22 June 1922 in Fort Wayne, the son of Ralph Aldrich Blass, a traveling hardware salesman, and Ethyl Keyser Blass, who made dresses. His father died when Bill was five, and the boy grew up in the house of a mother who sewed for a living, filling the margins of his schoolbooks with sketches of the clothes he saw in the movies. He had a local muse, and this section can name her, because Blass named her himself: among the Hollywood inspirations he cited was Carole Lombard, the Fort Wayne girl two entries back in this roll, whose screen wardrobe taught a Fort Wayne schoolboy what glamour was. He attended high school in Fort Wayne, South Side in the fuller accounts, and at seventeen he left for New York and the Parsons School of Design. The city produced the eye. New York gave it a career.

The war and the climb: Blass's war was one of the strangest in the American Army. He served with the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion, the unit of artists, designers and stagecraft men the Army set to deceiving the enemy, the Ghost Army, and his wartime notebooks, the Ghost Army's roster records, were filled with fashion designs, worked out between inflatable tanks. Home in 1945, he climbed the New York trade: sketch artist, then designer at Anna Miller and Company from about 1946, then, when that firm merged into Maurice Rentner Limited in 1959, the rising man of the house. In 1970 he bought the company and put his own name over the door: Bill Blass Limited. The name became a byword for American elegance, sportswear ease cut to couture standards, worn by the most photographed women in the country.

The standing: The trade's honours came in a pile: seven Coty Awards, the Council of Fashion Designers of America's lifetime honours, and the Fashion Institute of Technology's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999, the year he retired and sold his company, in a transaction reported at fifty million dollars. He gave ten million dollars to the New York Public Library, then the largest gift in its history to that point in the tellings of it, and left half his estate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He died on 12 June 2002 at New Preston, Connecticut, days short of eighty, his memoir Bare Blass published that year. Fort Wayne's claim is the standard one, and a strong one: born here, raised here, educated here, his mother sewing, his schoolbooks full of dresses, his first idea of elegance a Fort Wayne movie star. The people record carries his full entry; the fame roll carries him because for forty years the label in more elegant clothes than any other in America read, in effect, Fort Wayne, by way of Seventh Avenue.

Sources:

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Bill Blass (born 22 June 1922, Fort Wayne; Parsons at seventeen; Anna Miller; the Rentner purchase and renaming, 1970).
2. Ghost Army roster, William Ralph Blass, 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion (the Fort Wayne birth and schooling; the dressmaker mother; the wartime notebooks; the Carole Lombard inspiration; the New York Public Library gift).
3. Encyclopedia of Fashion, Blass, Bill (the career chronology; the Coty Awards; the 1999 sale and retirement).