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William Blass was born June 22, 1922, in Fort Wayne, Ind., the only child of Ralph Blass, the owner of a hardware store, and Ethyl Blass, a dressmaker. Blass played football, worked on the school paper and studied art at South Side High School in Fort Wayne, where he graduated in 1939. Blass started sketching designs when he was 17, and sold some to New York designers for $25 each. "Something about glamour interested me," he told People magazine in 1999. "All my schoolbooks had drawings of women on terraces with a cocktail and a cigarette." He moved to New York to study fashion at the Parsons School of Design, and worked as a sketch artist for a sportswear company before enlisting in the Army during World War II. After serving for 31/2 years, Blass was hired as a designer for the Manhattan firm of Anna Miller and Co. Blass joined Maurice Rentner Ltd. in 1959 and two years later was made vice president of the company, which was renamed Bill Blass Ltd. in 1970. Blass sold the company in 1999 to two fashion executives for $50 million. "I thought the end of the year, beginning of the new century, was the perfect time," he said at the time. "After all, I'd been doing it for 60 years." For the past 20 years, Blass lived in the small western Connecticut community of New Preston atop a hill on property he helped protect through preservation efforts, said a local official, Selectman Nicholas Solley. "He was private, but active in the community," Solley said. Blass would sketch a new collection nearly four months before showing it to buyers and the press. He often sketched at home, saying there wasn't enough time to create during office hours. Stan Herman, president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, said Blass' last fashion show in September 1999 in New York, which was almost canceled because of a terrible storm, exemplified the designer's spirit. "I remember his face vividly when he made the decision to go on," Herman said. "It was the great Blass 'Wow, this is life, I'll do the best I can."' At the show, the audience stood as Blass emerged when the last model left the runway. "There are not many standing ovations in fashion," Patrick McCarthy, chairman of Women's Wear Daily, told People magazine. "Bill just gave a little wave, barely perceptible, but it was a wave goodbye."
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