Multicolored Coat, Matisse-Style Pieces Standouts of Bill Blass Auction So Far

Guests mingled at the Bill Blass town house Thursday night for an up-close look at the vintage Bill Blass pieces, fashion sketches and personal letters across the designer’s career that are being auctioned at Christie’s.

The online auction, which features 129 pieces, opened Sept. 9 and runs through the morning of Sept. 23.

At the Blass town house at 3 East 44th Street in New York, attendees included Amy Fine Collins, Kay Unger, Joanne Mastroianni, Ruthie Davis, Nancy Chilton, Frederick Anderson, Dianne DeWitt and Batsheva Hay, along with Peter Som, a curatorial consultant to the project, and Peter Kim and Bill Kim, owners of the Bill Blass estate.

According to Christie’s, the auction is expected to realize in excess of $150,000, with funds going to the Bill Blass company.

The most in-demand piece of the sale so far is a multicolored dress coat of silk flowers under the label Bill Blass for Maurice Rentner. There have been 14 bids placed, and it’s up to $1,400. The sequined embroidered Matisse cocktail dress from 1988 is also doing well, according to a Christie’s spokeswoman.

The auction features tailored daywear and glamorous eveningwear. Among the sale highlights is a red, black and brown plaid suit identical to a look worn by Nancy Reagan deplaning from Air Force One with her husband, President Ronald Reagan, in February 1988 during her tenure as first lady, estimated to sell between $800 and $1,200, and a multicolored Michael Vollbracht for Bill Blass gown from the spring 2004 ready-to-wear show, identical to a look worn by Beyoncé Knowles-Carter for InStyle magazine, with an estimate of between $3,000 and $5,000. A gold metallic braided Klimt dress ensemble from Bill Blass, fall 1995, has an estimate of $1,500 to $2,500.

Asked if she plans to bid on anything, Dianne DeWitt, who previously modeled for Bill Blass and is now a real estate agent in Connecticut, said, “I should. I want to. I have a couple of things, and I loved them so much. Why not get something now and be able to wear it?

“I love all the sequins, but I really think his tailored items are so Bill Blass,” said DeWitt.

DeWitt said she loved modeling for Blass. “He was a fabulous man. He was just dapper, a gentleman. His Midwest flair was still always with him, and he was very funny,” She said during that time, you would see women wearing his outfits on a daily basis, and just know ‘that’s a Bill Blass.” You’d see Nancy Reagan, Pamela Harriman and Nancy Kissinger wearing Blass. “So that is very fun to see the photographs of them actually in his attire,” she said.

Unger said, “One of the things I’m trying to do is give away clothing. But I would [bid on something], it’s special. I always loved his jackets, and I kind of love the tennis sweater.”

“I’m in the market for a mother-of-the-bride dress,” said Chilton.

Som told WWD that the auction features 100 outfits plus ephemera and sketches. “But we really had to pick them out of thousands. We really wanted to home in on Mr. Blass’ signatures. You know, things he was known for, like his suiting, his sequin pieces, especially the Matisse-inspired ones, which are very iconic,” said Som. “There’s a lot of the color red, which he was known for, but really that glamorous eveningwear that he’s so known for.”

When asked what he thinks will fetch the highest price, he said, “It’s interesting. I think the Matisse pieces are such collectibles. You know, they’re really beautiful and a lot of the outerwear I’ve been seeing has been getting great response,” he said. He noted there’s a coat from the earlier years that is nice and a floral appliqué coat, which is one of his earliest pieces from Blass’ Maurice Rentner days.

Som began working on the auction at the beginning of the summer, “and then we really got into it in August.”

Discussing whether the letters from Giorgio Armani and Diana Vreeland will go for a lot of money, Som said, “We’ll see. I think for people who just love New York City history, this is a moment in time. He [Blass] worked for 50 years from the beginning of World War II up to 2000, which was his last collection. So there’s just this vast range of ephemera. There’s my personal favorites, which are these letters from Cecil Beton to him, which I think is amazing, and there’s letters from Diana Vreeland and Barbara Walters.”

Asked why they’re selling so much and not putting them in a museum, Som said, “There’s definitely so much more. This just really represents a small, select portion of what’s actually still there. So the archives are still robust. There’s still a lot there. This just represents the best of what Mr. Blass did,” said Som, who was a creative director of Bill Blass from 2007 to 2008 and, after having his namesake collection from 2001 to 2015, now focuses on the food space, having written a cookbook, and does fashion consulting.

The designer Frederick Anderson said, “I think it’s amazing to go through it, especially the fabrications because you know I love fabric. I like going through the evolution of everything and feeling how far we’ve come. Because even though these are beautiful designs, think of where we are in technology. So when you look at some of these ideas, I would think, ‘what would you do now with that technology on top of this?’ It’s amazing how this still stands up,” he said.

Anderson said he loved the short little jackets, with the Matisse print. “I think they’d be cool with a pair of white jeans and different styling.”

Robert Stone of Excel Branding Group, which manages new business development opportunities for Bill Blass, said when he came on board, they decided they were going to relaunch Blass’ licensing program. He toured the town house and saw there were thousands of pieces in the facility and thousands of sketches with his signature and his date books, etc. They decided, “We have to call Sotheby’s and Christie’s and see which one wants an auction.”