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Bill Blass and Kevyn Aucoin By Perry Brass
Fashion was popping out all over the place. I worked in advertising as a junior schlepper-translation: I did anything I could to stay in the cold world of commercial "aaaht"-and it was a time when being young and in that world was very exciting. Being young and gay in it was also exciting, in a covert way. We knew about each other, talked about each other, whispered about each other: fashion was out all over the place, but there was very little "out" in fashion. What there was in the clothes world was this constant undercurrent that we were here, queer, and getting even. The "girls"-or "boys"-did not rule fashion. That's a myth. There is a no gay Mafia that controls the rag world. Money does. The men who put up the money do, pay your check do--but there was this sense that since clothes were one place where we had a little island of safety, we could at least show the world we were here. The fashion world of the sixties and the early seventies was volatile and hot; it shared that sense of the 1920s and 1930s that clothes were a real aspect of your personality, not simply a cover-up for your lack of one. The Fifties Look, which kids who get all their pizzazz from mall stores like J. Crew and Banana Republic find so entrancing, was basically brain dead and mummified. It was Pat Nixon, Ike's golf shirts, and old ladies at the Opera. Then suddenly, by the mid-sixties, everything popped--especially for men's fashion. Men discovered once more that they had bodies. The Pierre Cardin look came to New York. Fitted suits, torso-revealing whisper-thin shirts, low-slung sexy pants. Young men started wearing clothes that were painted on them. I was walking down the streets of New York with my tongue out and people were also watching me. Looking at each other, downright cruising for clothes, became a pastime. All of this started to spin around Sundays in Central Park, at the glorious turnaround of Bethesda Fountain, which became the rag show of splendor for the Sixties decade.
Two recent deaths have brought this period back to me. In spades. Because they have also brought back to me some of my own history in the world of glamour. The first was the death of fashion designer Bill Blass last week. Blass belonged to that period of the covert queers in fashion. Being gay was never going to be as important as social climbing and getting even to Bill Blass. If there was a gayish fashion Mafia, based more on talent than on clout, he was a lieutenant in the family of figures like Mainbocher and Halston, hairdressers like Jackie Kennedy's solo-named Kenneth, and a loyal American vassal of Paris-gay Pierre Cardin. Blass, taking a cue from Oscar Wilde, understood that in fashion, art was life with a neat kick in the butt. The words usually used to describe Blass were "civilized, urbane," and that he had an "offhand glamour." He had that quality New Yorkers love to death called being a "regular guy," that is, if you happened to live regularly on Park Avenue. Basically what Blass did was take the same styles that were selling in Europe--the chic little woman's suit; the big showy ball gown; and what the French call the "afternoon ensemble"--and gave them a little, acceptable, sporty twist.
Blass came from that era when being gay was a not-terribly well kept secret, but you could get your revenge on the always cruel straight world by getting rich off the very people who might sneer at you behind your back. You could also sneer at them for needing you. It was a queer-versus-queer world, one of constant put-downs. The term "drop dead chic" meant something then: Drop DEAD! But the thing to do was get yourself in such a position that the straight money people wanted to keep having you around, no matter who was talking about you. Billy Baldwin, the top interior decorator in America in the Fifties and Sixties, knew this, as did Truman Capote, who wrote about this world of the "ladies who lunch." Both Baldwin and Capote were "Southern fags," whom the rich husbands of these ladies had to tolerate. Like Blass, they knew that success in this world meant knowing how to court these ladies, although Bill Blass was always better at knowing exactly how far to go with them. Baldwin was a good friend of Blass's, as was Bobby Short, who was black and mixed in the top level of society by entertaining it. Baldwin was a Southern queen with a cutting mouth, who liked rough trade, and sometimes got beat up by them. Bill Blass who came from a striving just-up-from-working class family from Indiana (the home of that other great New York queerish mega-talent, Cole Porter), was smart enough not to do that. Blass was famous for keeping his nose and other parts clean from scandal. He was also famous within my own gossip circle (and we all talked, the kids from the period who loved and lived fashion) for being cruel to the boys he picked up. They were picked up and dropped quickly. The stories chilled my blood. So once, when the always debonair Mr. Blass made a pass at me, I made sure I did not respond. He was with Bobby Short and the sheer glamour of the two of them on New York's very glamorous Fifty-seventh Street, set off sparks for me. Blass had a smile that had wattage in it. But I knew that behind that smile was a man who was playing a game too hard for me. You had to be tough inside to play that game, and I was not that tough. Years later, in a series of print ads for his clothing and perfume line, Blass talked about what kind of "woman I could go for." He says (or the copywriter put these words into his mouth): "I could go for a woman who reads books instead of book reviews. Who would spend her last one hundred dollars on perfume, especially my perfume. Who knows how to listen," Etc. etc. I read the ad and thought: you probably could, you lying little devil. You didn't make all those millions and millions of dollars saying you could really go for a woman with something big between her--anyway, the fashion world does not lie like that anymore. I could just imagine the laughter coming out, with choruses of hip kids saying, "Uh huh!" But it's not as glamorous either.
It must be within the very hands that made it; the eyes that guide those hands; the places where it is worn, and the people who wear it. I think that as obsessed as we are now with buying things and throw-away clothes, that has been lost. And Bill Blass was one of the last men in America who had that mystique. In fact, despite that Midwestern streak inside him that hid anything that resembled a "personal life," he embodied that mystique. The other death, which I wanted to write about earlier but got detained from, was that of the famed make up artist, Kevyn Aucoin, who died on May 7, 2002. Aucoin was only forty when died of a rare pituitary brain tumor; he had become, in a short career of less than two decades, the most famous make up artist in the world. He had written several books about make up, and one, Making Faces, had actually entered the New York Times bestseller list as Number One. No mean accomplishment for anyone. Kevyn grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, one of those places that smart gay kids will do anything to leave. He had a brutal childhood. His father never forgave him for not being a normal little jock boy; he was constantly harassed and beaten up at school. Since I had lived in New Orleans and been raised in the deep South myself, I knew exactly what he'd been through. In Louisiana, like in Texas and Alabama, football is a religion and you're either a prom queen or a half-back. Gay men know this, and many who try to survive in this culture spend most of their lives either trying to live this down, or give into it and become prom queens. Kevyn did not. By the time he'd left Shreveport and come to New York, at twenty, with almost no education and no money, he had become aware of what he was, what he wanted to do, and how he'd do it. His talent for handling make up--and for handling people, especially insecure star-power women--was instantly discovered. He had this amazing, warm, truthful generosity. He was also very self-promoting, a virtue that did not go unnoticed in New York in the 1980s, where he burst into beauty stardom. Like Barbra Streisand, whom he admired for being herself, his was one of the quintessential New York ugly duckling stories: miserable sissy boy from a Louisiana backwater, turns into a tall, handsome, make up star in the bustling beauty scene of New York. Once he became a star, he was also totally out--he brought his partner into make up shoots, worked tirelessly for abused gay kids through New York's Hetrick Martin Institute, and became very much a part of the city's glitsy club-and-pub scene. He was constantly featured in HX and Next , the two rival gay glossy bar rags, which cover the city's night scene when the lights come on and the real working boys come out. As I read Kevyn Aucoin's obit in the Times, I was brought back to my own stint in the "beau monde" world of beauty, back in the mid-seventies. The seventies, in case you were not born then, were a time of fashion glamour in New York. The glam was real because the people were real--they were not simply corporate wax dummies used to sell the same products over and over again. On the streets and in the discos and stores, you'd see Betsy Johnson who was still a young, playful, funky woman; Diane and Egon von Furstenburg, who were still married; Stephen Burrows, who was discovered at Bendal's and became the first Hispanic fashion celebrity; Calvin Klein, as a young gay guy; as well as the late Halston, who was tremendously talented, and the young late Perry Ellis, who was not. Ellis did come up with the hugely original idea that ninety percent of fashion was retailing--a concept we are living with now. He was not a designer, but a buyer--and he knew what kids on the street wanted to buy. This has left American fashion spinning its wheels for the last two decades--but, hey, we have other things to think about now, right? At that point, I was doing beauty publicity for a management agency that promoted entertainment and sports figures. One of my clients was a nationally known make up artist, I'll call her Gloria, who was perched up there for the big time. She had been featured in scores of Vogue cover shoots, Mademoiselle layouts, and high fashion work. We were thinking in terms of capturing a perfume and make up line for her. One of Gloria's selling points was that she was a real woman, and real women, as opposed to gay men, were starting to make it in beauty. Two black models, Beverly Johnson and Naomi Simms, had shown that there was room for black women in the market, and my agency believed that Gloria, who could be petulant, temperamental, and ornery, could do for suburban "housewife" beauty what Martha Stewart would later do for sheets and towels. Gloria was blonde, petite, and from the white South of Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott. Like many people in the beauty business, she was also ardently homophobic. When you work constantly around a group of minority people, it's easy for your own prejudices to come out, despite your own protestations about "some of my best friends." She referred to gay men who were make up artists and were sent out for day shoots by modeling agencies (most modeling agencies had their own rosters of make up artists) as "rent-a-fags." About magazine shoots she said, "Look, they can either rent a fag, or get somebody real like me." She would say this in front of me, then either smile or after her third of fourth fag remark, make a quick apology as in: "No offense, Perry." I would leave Gloria in state of rage, but since she was a client and was paying my salary, I could say nothing. She had tried to get me fired a few times, saying that I didn't "service" her enough. This's P.R.-ese for: I didn't give her a hundred percent of my time or attention. As I went around trying to sell Gloria to more magazines--one of the things P.R. people do is engage their client with the media--I learned that there was a kind of gentleman's agreement then about queer beauty artists, just like there was about gay fashion designers. The agreement was based on the fact that gays had always found a place in this world of womanly products and manly money. The people who control the money in beauty and fashion-- we are talking about 100 billion dollars a year in revenue--are almost always straight men who believe that beauty and fashion stars are as replaceable as poodles. However, as long as the gays kept their noses clean and didn't "flaunt" themselves, the hard money could co-exist with the boys with a little too much air in their loafers. When this did not happen, as in the case of Halston whose drugging and hustler-customer lifestyle got in the way, the money bags would drop the fairies and find new ones. Fashion and beauty are both publicity-driven industries, and bad publicity will kill you just as quickly as trying to push pink in a beige year. All of this changed, though, with AIDS. Suddenly with a few exceptions, like Bill Blass, it became harder and harder for the gay boys to stay holed up in their glammy closets. And even Blass became an ardent supporter of AIDS organizations, since the disease had taken many of his friends. It was wonderful then to read about Kevyn Aucoin, as sad truly as his premature death was. For Kevyn, whose art was make up, an art even more evanescent than fashion, there will be very little left of him in the years to come. But there will be his legacy in the gay kids he's helped and the story of his own life and how he led it. That he had worked his way through this bitchy business with truth and kindness and integrity, warms and delights me. If he were here right now, I'd give him a kiss. 
Perry Brass's newest novel is WARLOCK, A Novel of Possession,
that does deal with the interesting intersection of business and evil.
His "domestic partnership" is not underwritten by any of the Fortune 500.
He can be reached through his website www.perrybrass.com. For more information
on WARLOCK, go to http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ ASIN/1892149036/107-8161877-7587701
Telephone: 1 (800) 365-2401.
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Designer Kevyn Aucoin died on May 7, 2002
Bill Blass 
Kevyn Aucoin and Julia Roberts 
© 1997-2002 BEI