BILL BLASS: The midwestern town of Fort Wayne, Indiana, boasts of being the home of baking powder, juke boxes and parking meters. The fashion designer and entrepreneur Bill Blass, born there on June 22nd, 1922, the son of a hardware salesman, had only one Depression-era egress from it, the cinemas. There, he could watch another Fort Worth local, Carole Lombard, among other stars, up on the screen wearing bias-cut satin by Adrian in the period's fantasy venue: a New York penthouse.
Bill Blass, who died on June 12th aged 79 having recently sold his $700 million-a-year business, claimed those ladies were his inspiration. He drew them, and later used a prize in a Chicago Tribune design contest to finance his time at the Parsons School of Art and Design in New York.
But his real way up and out was the wartime army; first, like many others with artistic gifts, he was assigned to the US 603rd Camouflage Battalion, where he inflated decoy rubber tanks and painted everything else as something it wasn't; then, in 1944-'45, he advanced with the invasion army through the Battle of the Bulge and the crossing of the Rhine, slightly anglicising his accent en route.
On his return to New York, his rise was slow and quiet. He was sacked by Anne Klein for being "talentless"; then he worked anonymously in the minor firm of Anna Miller until, on her retirement in 1959, her brother, Maurice Rentner, merged their companies.
After Rentner died in 1960, he began to label his work "Bill Blass for Maurice Rentner". In 1970, uncommonly for the time, he bought the firm, and renamed it as his own.
He was a class act, and the customers matched: Brooke Astor, Nancy Kissinger, Happy Rockefeller, Gloria Vanderbilt, and the Barbaras Bush, Streisand and Walters - all those definitive ladies who lunched. He called them "babe" and "kiddo" and waved his cigarette in salute; they, in turn, through the 1970s and 1980s, invited him to their parties.
He remembered all he observed, which explained why he was so certain of their tastes. His prices were appropriately couture.
American women designers like Claire McCardell already understood that sportswear was their country's great contribution to fashion, but Bill Blass went further, into couture sportswear, cutting polo coats in camel hair and knitting sailor jerseys in cashmere, and slipping such luxuriously casual clothes over and under more formal garments - like that New York perennial, the sweater over the satin ball-gown skirt. Paris didn't do that, at least not comfortably.
In 1967, even before he took over Rentner, he went into menswear, and not very conservatively, either: Life magazine described his indiscreet suits as styled between "Damon Runyon and the Duke of Windsor", while others thought his plaid wear was more "mafiosi on the golf course".
Once he was owner of Bill Blass Ltd, he followed Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent into licencing, understanding as early as the 1970s the potential in the words "brand name" and "designer label".
There was the Blassport range, and jeans, home furnishings and fragrances; there were uniforms for American Airlines, and, annually, the interiors of the Bill Blass Lincoln Continental (although he never learned to drive); by the 1980s, there were even chocolates.
When in doubt, Bill Blass advised women to wear red; and when Nancy Reagan asked what was right for the Gorbachevs' dacha, he replied: "Something simple."
By the late 1990s, Bill Blass's empire embraced 97 licencees, and had an annual worldwide turnover exceeding $700 million. In 1999, he sold the business to his former chief finance officer for a reported $50 million, and left after his spring 2000 collections; he had meant to go on in retirement, but was diagnosed with throat cancer. The company continues with a new head designer, Lars Nilsson of Sweden.
There is a bronze marker in his name in the fashion Walk of Fame on Seventh Avenue; he won the Coty American fashion critics' award three times, and took the first Coty award for men's wear; he held a lifetime achievement award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 1987, as well as its humanitarian leadership award.
He once said: "The secret of living is not staying too long. I have learned when to leave the party." His private life stayed remarkably private to the end.
William Ralph (Bill) Blass: born 1922; died, June 2002