"The clothes were slightly overdone," recalled Sylvia Sheppard, a fashion editor for Women's Wear Daily during Blackwell's heyday. "He wasn't a creative designer."
But to be a fashion designer was never his top priority. As Blackwell recounted in his autobiography, "From Rags to Bitches" (1995), he aimed "to become my most unforgettable creation: king of the caustic quote, arbiter of good taste and bad, the ultimate mix of madness, marketing and media attention."
His finger-wagging fashion reports were a twist on the annual best-dressed lists that were popular in the 1940s and '50s. Fashion expert and author Patty Fox said recently that Blackwell was the first she knew of to take an irreverent approach. Dozens of variations followed.
While Blackwell claimed he was "not unkind," his critiques ranged from merely catty -- "Words fail me!" he wrote in 1963 of screen ingenue Sandra Dee -- to cutting: -- "Do-it-yourself kit with the wrong instructions!" he pronounced about the fashion taste of Hollywood sex kitten Elke Sommer in his 1973 list.
"The list has whimsy," he insisted. "It's camp."
At times he published his choices for the best-dressed women of the year. Joan Crawford and Audrey Hepburn ranked in the 1960s, Nicole Kidman later on.
He announced his verdicts at an annual news conference in his Hancock Park home. Several times in the early 1970s, he was invited to expand on his choices as a guest on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson." In the 1980s and '90s, he commented on Oscar fashions during televised coverage of the Academy Awards.
He included men, particularly if they dressed in drag on screen or stage. Comedian Milton Berle got dinged in 1996 for his "padded brassiere and corseted rear." Boy George, the pop singer who wore lipstick and eye shadow, and Elton John with his feathered capes got caught in Blackwell's radar in the 1980s.
Some of Blackwell's targets fired back. When he took aim at country singer Barbara Mandrell in 1981 ("Yukon Sally playing the Alamo"), she sent him a jeweled lapel pin that spelled out "Big Mouth." He wore it proudly.
Others, including Jayne Mansfield, turned to him for advice. In 1961, after criticizing the actress with the hourglass figure for her "plunging neckline [that] has become a bare midriff problem," he supplied her with a wardrobe for her role in "Promises! Promises!" a 1963 movie best known for Mansfield's nude scenes.
