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Sunday, April 16, 2000
By Barbara Cloud
Richard Blackwell has his own Web site.
You know who he is, don't you? He's "the man with the list" of best- and worst-dressed among notables. We're seeing lots of those since the Oscars.
If you ever saw the musical "Gypsy," you might recall the show-stopping number "You Gotta Get a Gimmick."
That's Mr. Blackwell.
He comes up with his lists each January like clockwork, and he's been doing it for 39 years.
His list peps up any abysmal news day, and while it remains memorable only as long as it takes to read it, it garners space on newscasts and in newspapers all over the country.
Why is that? I have wondered aloud and in print, "Who died and made you the expert?"
Now I'm getting wise to what it takes to attract Mr. Blackwell's attention.
The Spice Girls made the worst-dressed list in 1998. Today, they're old news.
Cher topped the same list last year. The reason? She made a major comeback from obscurity. She was news again.
What was interesting, at least to me, was that just four years ago, Blackwell dismissed any mention of Cher. He said then, "She hasn't been around for a long time, and she buried herself completely when she did that navel bit. She's no longer on my list."
What a difference a few years make.
"You've got to talk about people that you can see," he once told an interviewer.
We are seeing Cher again. We're also seeing her navel, and everybody else's.
Blackwell is an interesting guy.
When he was still designing clothes for retail stores, his early lists of best and worst often included his own customers, and not always as best-dressed.
Just spell the name right. That's show biz.
Since Blackwell started turning out these lists in 1960, he's often seen as a TV talk-show guest, baring all his cosmetic surgeries. Before that and before entering the dress business, he had a brief movie career that began with a Dead End Kids film.
He started life as Richard Selzer, then was Dick Ellis, but had his name changed to Blackwell by Howard Hughes.
The first list he came up with, he says, outraged half the world. The other half loved it. By the third year, it was a major news event.
His designing fame, if you can call it that, came with the cocktail clothes he designed for some of Hollywood's sexiest women. He used to refer to his dresses as "above the table" dresses.
Get the picture? Low-cut necklines were the trademark of a Mr. Blackwell design.
I attended several shows of his collections in California when William Travilla, Helen Rose and Luis Estevez were among those West Coast film costumers who also had retail-store clients.
Blackwell often turned out very wearable, glamorous clothes that eventually were interpreted in large sizes for Lane Bryant. He was one of the first to recognize that amply endowed woman wanted glamour, and he certainly gave it all he had.
While I shook my head at his audacity, I liked Blackwell. He was funny. He also seemed sensitive. He invited editors to his Beverly Hills home, which is where I met, and stared at, Jane Russell, certainly an amply endowed customer, in the late '60s.
Lists by themselves don't do it. It's the catch phrases Blackwell uses. He's good at it.
The book he wrote about his life in 1995 was called "Rags to Bitches." Does that tell you something?
One year, in selecting Madonna for his "worst" list, he described her as going from "Style Snore to Bumpy Bore." Pamela Anderson Lee was like "a Martian Venus in search of a shell."
Divas of the moment are his targets, always.
If your name is on either list, hey, you're hot.
As much as I question a man who has his own portrait painted on dinner plates as telling us who has taste and who doesn't, I have to admire the fact Blackwell found his niche. He reinvented himself.
Now that most tabloids and magazines are putting out best-and-worst fashion lists from every major event, Blackwell might lose the edge he has coveted for 39 years.
We've already judged the Oscar fashions, but you can bet Blackwell seized the opportunity for more press with his own biting comments.
Hey, it's show biz.