blass 4.bla.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

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Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . IN early December 1999, the mood in the Bill Blass showroom at 550 Seventh Avenue was as gray as the film of dust on a potted plant that sat in the corner and always seemed to be dying. http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-jmbPCHg9dLPh1gHoZxLG.GpS

Blass, arguably the most famous of all the American designers, had shown his farewell collection that September and sold the company a few weeks later. He had been ill for some time, living with throat cancer for years — he was then 77 — and he didn’t seem much inclined to argue with the new owners about who would fill his oversize shoes. They wanted a name. So the future of Blass’s longtime assistants was far from certain. Laura Montalban, one of two top designers, left to work for Oscar de la Renta; Blass called the other, Craig Natiello, who had been with him for a decade, into his office.http://web.mac.com/lousheehan

“You’re not going to like the people who bought the company,” Blass said. He made a phone call, then told Mr. Natiello, who recalled the conversation in a recent interview, that there was a job waiting for him at Halston. “Here is your out. Do you want it?”

Mr. Natiello was reminded of this moment the other day when he bumped into Adolfo Sardina, the famous Adolfo, at a deli near his apartment on the Upper East Side. In 1962, Blass had given Adolfo the $10,000 he needed to start his own millinery collection, so they both remembered what he did for them and for fashion; and they, like the remnants of a generation of society women, couldn’t quite believe the Bill Blass legacy was ending in such an ignoble way. On Friday, the last sewers, patternmakers and assistants were laid off without severance as the company, after years of turmoil and a revolving door of designers, began to dismantle. NexCen Brands, its parent company, was discontinuing the collection, even as it was still trying to sell the brand.

“I want to go in there and throttle their necks!” Mr. Natiello said.

Much as Chanel and Dior and YSL carried on as luxury concerns well after the deaths of their namesakes, no American label seemed better poised to persevere in the absence of its founder than Bill Blass did. Blass, when he bought out his former partners in Maurice Rentner in 1970 to form Bill Blass Ltd., changed things for designers on Seventh Avenue, who used to toil in the relative obscurity of its backrooms. By the sheer force of his talent and wit — upon his death in 2002, he was remembered as the Noël Coward of fashion — he brought glamour to the job. He dressed and drank and dined with Nan Kempner, Pat Buckley and Brooke Astor, and, by the 1990s, he was so famous that his company had more than 40 licenses with annual sales of $500 million of Bill Blass products.

There is no shortage of explanations for the label’s demise. There was an aging clientele, a management that seemed to take a freewheeling approach to the brand and its failure to find a successor who could match the Blass persona. That the problems were endemic became evident last spring, when NexCen said it faced a severe cash shortage. Peter Som, the latest designer, left in October and was not replaced, while the company told retailers it would not be taking orders for a spring collection. Ultimately, NexCen blamed the economic climate.

“It is the passing of a brand that held a lot of meaning for not only me but for many people in the fashion industry,” Mr. Som said last week in an e-mail message. “We have truly lost a legacy.”

THE REAL TROUBLE at Bill Blass started the moment Blass himself walked out the door without an heir apparent.

“It was an enormous question mark that hung over all of us,” said John Lindsey, who was the director of sales at Bill Blass for 12 years.

That fall, Blass had retreated to his home near New Preston, Conn., but he kept a sly eye on what was happening at the company. The new owners, who acquired the business through a bond deal that placed a premium on the future value of the trademark, were Michael Groveman, who had been the chief financial officer at Bill Blass for 10 years, and Haresh T. Tharani, who ran its largest licensee.

They began to look for a successor, interviewing designers like Randolph Duke, James Purcell and Steven Slowik. There was huge interest in the position, and Mr. Groveman seemed to recognize the leverage he had when negotiating with designers.

“For three hours, he said, ‘I’m going to make you the designer here,’ ” Mr. Purcell recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not doing anything unless I have a contract.’ He said, ‘Do you want to be famous or don’t you?’ ”

In February 2000, Mr. Slowik, who had worked for Ferragamo and was living in Paris, took the job — without a contract.

Handsome, unassuming, tasteful, Midwestern (from Detroit), he had good credentials. Blass, a Hoosier, liked him right away.

“The first thing he asked me was my sign,” Mr. Slowik said. Like Blass (and his “dear friends” Nancy Reagan and Lynn Wyatt), he is a Cancer. That September, Mr. Slowik had his first big show. The pressure, he said, was tremendous. The clothes were less structured, more sparkly, less Blass. And the reviews were scathing. One critic called it the “My Little Pony” collection, a reference to a finale dress that had a cartoonish rainbow ribbon splashed across one side, as if it were magic.

“That was an absolute disaster,” Mr. Lindsey said. “All I remember was standing there, watching the whole front row — our clientele — with their hands over their ears as Madonna blasted on the speakers, and then they chose to go out a different door to avoid saying anything to me, because they couldn’t think of anything nice to say. That was the longest 11 minutes of my career.”

Sales were dismal, he said. In one season, the collection business, which had sold $25 million in a good year, dropped to about $5 million. Mr. Slowik carried on and designed a fall collection, but in January 2001, just weeks before he was to show it, he was dismissed. Lars Nilsson, his assistant, became the head designer.

“It certainly wasn’t fun,” Mr. Slowik said. “One of the things I learned from this situation: if people aren’t willing to give you a contract, there’s a problem.”

Mr. Groveman, who left the company in July, would not discuss hiring decisions. He said he never had a contract when he worked for Blass, either.

“I don’t have any regrets about what happened,” he said. “It’s never easy replacing the namesake designer.”

THE NIGHT OF FEB. 10, 2003, Mr. Nilsson, a designer from Sweden who had trained at Dior and Lacroix, was preparing the fall collection, his fifth at the house. Mr. Nilsson had the enthusiastic endorsement of the editors of Vogue, but his clothes weren’t selling. André Leon Talley, the magazine’s editor at large, was in the showroom to offer guidance. Tensions had been building between Mr. Nilsson and management, with reports of screaming matches over creative control. Mr. Nilsson knew his job was on the line.

What he did not know was that seven floors below, another collection was being designed simultaneously in the Blass executive offices by Yvonne Miller, who had been a fit model and the public relations director for Blass. She knew the Blass designs better than anyone and always thought she should have been asked to replace him.

Describing the events last week, Ms. Miller said Mr. Groveman had asked her to have a ghost collection ready for the stores in the event Mr. Nilsson’s line failed.

“I didn’t want to get fired,” she said. “And I’m the only one who can design Blass.”

Mr. Nilsson showed his collection on Feb. 11. Its Scandinavian influences were sometimes absolutely beautiful, like a white-on-white embroidered anorak that was breathtaking. But sometimes they were not. On Feb. 12, as the reviews came in, mostly negative, and he and his assistant were about to leave for Paris to buy fabrics for the next season, Mr. Groveman fired him.

It was a scandal that consumed the fashion industry and enraged the Vogue editors. Mr. Talley complained at the time that Mr. Nilsson “couldn’t even do an embroidery unless it was approved.” But Ms. Miller and other Blass executives said Mr. Nilsson had been unreasonable and had refused to rein in his spending on lavish fabrics, causing the company to lose money.

“Management took it on the chin, kind of unfairly,” Mr. Lindsey said. “It looked very heavy-handed, but they didn’t want to turn him loose again.”

The problem was how it was handled, said Michael Vollbracht, who replaced Mr. Nilsson the next month: “When they fired Lars Nilsson, they fired Anna Wintour. And that you do not do.”

MR. VOLLBRACHT, who worked with Blass on a retrospective book that was published in 2002, speaks in the same gravel tone tinged with grouchiness as the late designer. He had been on Seventh Avenue for decades before taking a 15-year hiatus to work as an artist. But no matter how much the critics begged him to design something modern, he was determined to revisit the Blass of old. He brought back Karen Bjornson, Halston’s house model in the 1980s, as his muse.

“Quite honestly, I got the formula of Bill Blass,” he said. “It wasn’t revolutionary design.”

Over the next four years, the press dried up, but the clients came back. Sales of the collection climbed to about $12 million, and new licenses were signed for shoes, fur and a home collection. But the collection was still losing money, about $2 million a year, because of the production costs and runway shows. In December 2006, Mr. Groveman and Mr. Tharani sold the Bill Blass corporation to NexCen, a conglomerate that also owned the Athlete’s Foot and mall stores like Great American Cookies, for $54.6 million, but Mr. Groveman retained the collection business.

Things seemed to calm down. There was even a sense of nostalgic elegance in the collections, with Pat Cleveland vamping on Mr. Vollbracht’s runway. Then, in May 2007, he quit. NexCen, he said, wanted him to serve as a mentor to the younger designers he had hired, which made him feel a bit like Margo Channing.

“I was going to be the coach of this young, effervescent design team that’s going to win back Vogue magazine,” Mr. Vollbracht said. “I had put in place a staff that was becoming more powerful than I was, and I learned long ago to leave before they ask you to leave.”

IN JULY 2007, Mr. Som became the fourth designer to take over the collection. As a design student, he had interned with Blass, and his signature collections were often remarked upon as Blass-like. He was Vogue-approved.

His first collection, shown in February of this year, looked, well, about the same. The big stores were encouraged.

But in a matter of months, everything fell apart. Without warning, NexCen announced in May that there was “substantial doubt” that it would remain in business and that its accounting was in question. At Blass, fabric bills went unpaid, and in July Mr. Groveman told NexCen he would rather shutter the line than sink any more money into it. NexCen, hoping to sell the label, bought the Groveman stake for about $425,000 in net liabilities and persuaded Mr. Som to stay on to entice a buyer. Now, five months later, with no deal in place, NexCen has pulled the plug.

“To see it go down so quickly, I’m saddened,” Mr. Groveman said. “It’s the end of a great American brand.”

For the Bill Blass collection to fail in such an ugly way strikes many of those involved in the company as an especially cruel fate for a designer who made the profession seem so dazzling. If Blass were around to see what has become of his house today, he might think it was the 1950s, when, as Charles Gandee, a onetime editor at Vogue and Talk, wrote, designers “were regarded as slightly tedious, slightly embarrassing necessities.”

When anyone asked Blass what he did, he’d simply say, “I’m in advertising.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.