Bill Blass: the dressmaker's son from South Calhoun Street

1922 — 2002

Born and raised here, precisely: William Ralph Blass was born in Fort Wayne on 22 June 1922 and grew up at 3618 South Calhoun Street, across from the high school he attended. His father, Ralph, a traveling hardware salesman, died when Bill was five; his mother, Ethyl, a dressmaker, supported the family sewing in a spare room of the house — the first fashion atelier he ever saw. At South Side High School he studied art under Blanche Hutto, took the bus across town to children's classes at the Fort Wayne Art School on West Berry Street, decorated banquets, ran a small business decorating and selling Easter eggs that the News-Sentinel wrote up in 1939, and sketched dresses — some of which, at seventeen, he sold to a New York dress manufacturer for $25 apiece. He won a cash prize in the Chicago Tribune's 1940 American Fashion Competition, and at seventeen he left Fort Wayne for New York.

The career that followed is American fashion history, and its outline belongs here because Fort Wayne is where it started. Blass studied at the McDowell School and at Parsons, sketched for the David Crystal sportswear house, and in 1943 enlisted in the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion — the "Ghost Army" — filling his wartime notebooks with the fashion designs and the mirrored-B monogram that became his house logo. He joined Maurice Rentner Ltd. in 1959, was made vice president in 1961, and in 1970 the firm became Bill Blass Ltd. His clean, mix-and-match sportswear defined an American style against the Paris houses; he is credited as the first American couture designer to start a menswear line, and he built licensing — his name on everything from luggage to chocolate — into an enterprise reported at $700 million a year. He dressed Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush, won the Coty American Fashion Critics Award in 1961, 1963, and 1970 and the Council of Fashion Designers of America award in 1986, presented his final collection in the fall of 1999, sold the company for $50 million, and died at New Preston, Connecticut, on 12 June 2002. Fort Wayne kept its claim on him: the Fort Wayne Museum of Art holds the evening-gown sketches he drew as a teenager for Blanche Hutto (a gift of her estate) and, for his centenary, mounted Bill Blass: Fort Wayne's Fashion Designer from 22 June to 18 September 2022, the first exhibition of his designs in his home city; South Side named him a charter Distinguished Alumnus in the mid-1990s; and the Ghost Army, Blass among them, received the Congressional Gold Medal — the act was signed on 1 February 2022 (Public Law 117-85), with the formal presentation in March 2024. His school-leaving year is carried two ways in the record — 1939 in his obituary, 1940 in the school's and the museum's accounts — and is printed here as the record gives it.

Sources:

1. Associated Press obituary of Bill Blass (13 June 2002, via Legacy) — the Fort Wayne birth, the dressmaker mother, South Side, the $25 sketches, the Coty years 1961/1963/1970, the CFDA award of 1986, and the $700-million figure.
2. Fort Wayne Museum of Art, "Fort Wayne Fashion Icon Bill Blass" (2018) and the 2022 centenary exhibition record — the Art School classes, the 1939 News-Sentinel Easter-egg story, the Blanche Hutto sketches in the permanent collection, and the exhibition dates.
3. Ghost Army Legacy Project roster biography — the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion service, the wartime notebooks, and the 1940 Chicago Tribune competition prize.
4. Bill Blass Legacy, Inc. — the 3618 South Calhoun Street address, the South Side Distinguished Alumni award (a charter award of the mid-1990s; no source pins the year), and the 2022 Congressional Gold Medal.
5. ACGSI, "Bill Blass," Allen County people record — the Fort Wayne documentation and the Bill Blass Archive at the Allen County Public Library.