Bill Blass Dies in Connecticut

Bill Blass, the celebrity designer who oversaw a multimillion-dollar fashion business, died at his home in New Preston, Conn. He was 79. The cause was cancer.

Blass was a three-time winner of the Coty American Fashion Critics Award, and in 1968 was given the first Coty Award for men's wear. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 1987, and in 1996 was the first recipient of its Humanitarian Leadership Award. In 1973, he was one of five American designers invited to participate with five French designers in a fashion show at the Palace of Versailles, one of the first events in which American design was internationally recognized.

“He made sportswear couture,” said Ellin Saltzman, a former senior vp and fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman. “He took American sportswear to its highest level and combined it with sexy menswear touches, giving it new, clean, modern, impeccable style. He, probably better than any other designer, knew his customer and understood her.”

John Fairchild, the former publisher of Women's Wear Daily, called him “the gentleman of American fashion – the perfect gentleman.”

Blass was born in Fort Wayne, Ind. in 1922, and said that as a youngster he was inspired at Saturday movie matinees by the glamour of Marlene Dietrich and Carole Lombard. “Those women inspired me, and I had to get out [of Indiana],” he said years later.

After graduation from high school, he won second prize in a design contest sponsored by The Chicago Tribune. He came to New York in the summer of 1940, studied for a short time at the McDowell School of Fashion, and went to work as a $35-a-week sketch artist for David Crystal, a manufacturer of moderate-priced clothes on Seventh Avenue.

He enlisted in the Army in 1943 and was assigned to a specialized counterintelligence unit. He returned to New York after the war and joined Anne Klein as an assistant. But he was soon dismissed. “She said I had good manners but no talent,” Blass once recalled. He then landed a job as a low man on the totem pole at a manufacturer named Anna Miller. When Miller retired in 1959, her business was merged with that of her brother, Maurice Rentner, then a well-regarded fashion house. Blass's designs gradually became recognized and, when Rentner died in 1960, Blass got his name on the label. In 1970, he bought out the Rentner firm and changed the name to Bill Blass Ltd.

He continued to push the boundaries of his business, adding a moderate-price line called Blassport and new licensees to a list that included jeans, lounge wear, home furnishings, sportswear and fragrances. Eventually, his name was on everything from perfume to bed linens, from chocolates to the interior of Lincoln Continentals. (Over the years he turned down offers to design coffins and dental braces that would bear his initials.) By putting his name on a variety of products, beginning in the 1960s, Blass became known outside the rather limited world of women's fashion. By the mid-1990s, he had 97 business licensing agreements, generating retail sales of more than $700 million a year worldwide, to swell a ready-to-wear business that grossed about $9 million annually.