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A fine redesign

Fashion designer Michael Vollbracht landed in Safety Harbor when his business folded. Now, almost two decades later, he's back in the fashion world, but with a different perspective.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published December 10, 2005

[Times photo: William Dunkley]

After his fashion business collapsed, designer Michael Vollbracht moved to Saftey Harbor and redesigned the interior of a house he bought. Now back in the fashion world as the designer for Bill Blass Ltd., he often escapes to the house in Safety Harbor that he calls home.

	[AP photo]
	First lady Laura Bush, wearing a Bill Blass gown designed by Michael Vollbracht, joins the president before a state dinner in July at the White House.

SAFETY HARBOR - "Turn left," Michael Vollbracht says, giving directions to a visitor coming for lunch, "and go to the bitter end. That's where I am."

A bitter end might have been expected almost 20 years ago when the once-famous fashion designer landed in this community on Old Tampa Bay. For several years in the early 1980s, he had been the toast of New York, a rising star in the cliquish design world, winning a coveted Coty Award and dressing celebrities from Farrah Fawcett to Elizabeth Taylor.

All that changed in 1985 when his business partners, Johnny and Joanna Carson, went through a bitter divorce and the cash flow ceased. Michael Vollbracht Inc. folded, and almost overnight he was Michael Who? to many former friends. Nearly broke, he accepted the invitation of an acquaintance to move to Safety Harbor and help renovate its famous, aging spa in exchange for free room and board.

He painted canvases and showed them at a local gallery, supporting himself with sales.

"I grew up poor," he says, "and I don't need much."

When word went around about his presence, locals came to Vollbracht for help with fundraisers. He lent some of his past designs for charity fashion shows and donated paintings to auctions. He bought a small concrete-block house on a acre of property in a modest neighborhood and began fixing it up. He began to find a peaceful rhythm away from his frenetic, famous former life.

Now, two decades later, he's still here in that small house, but these days only for brief vacations. And the end at this point seems anything but bitter.

Vollbracht, 58, has made a comeback rarely seen in the fashion world. He is head designer for the house that once belonged to the late Bill Blass, one of the few friends who stuck by Vollbracht after his public crash.

Blass sold his business in 1999 and asked Vollbracht to assist with a retrospective of his work and to edit a glossy coffee-table book to go with it. They finished it shortly before Blass's death in 2002.

The new business partners who owned the Blass line had hired and fired two designers because of poor sales. In 2003, they turned to Vollbracht, who knew the Bill Blass aesthetic better than any other living person. He moved back to New York and got to work. In less than three years with Vollbracht as its designer, Bill Blass Ltd. is prospering.

The famous frames on whom his elegant suits and dresses hang range from Paris Hilton to Laura Bush. Diane Lane has worn Bill Blass on the red carpet. Janet Jackson wore Bill Blass to Oprah Winfrey's 50th birthday bash. And Winfrey herself shops the line.

"That's all very nice," Vollbracht says. "And important because it gets the name out there. And that's what sells the sunglasses and shoes."

Sunglasses, shoes and other collateral items are the real cash cows for fashion houses, and Vollbracht says Bill Blass has about $700-million in licensing deals.

"Probably the men's socks are paying my salary," he says.

But the clothes, which can cost thousands of dollars, sell to women who want a well-bred femininity rather than what Vollbracht calls "the Prada sensibility of ugly chic."

So he flogs the clothes in cities around the world at trunk shows hosted by stores such as Saks and Neiman Marcus. He has gone as far as Dubai, where, he says, "women wear long black robes in public but spend millions on clothes and jewelry they wear at home. Sometimes you can walk along a sidewalk and see the hem of a designer gown flutter underneath the robes."

Vollbracht has every reason for elation about his ascension but his response is more measured validation and pragmatism.

"I have my detractors," he says. "I'm not respected by the fashion press and I understand it."

He is referring in part to Vogue magazine's all-powerful editor, Anna Wintour, who was mightily miffed when Lars Nilsson, Vollbracht's predecessor at Bill Blass, was dismissed after she had promoted him heavily on her pages. Vogue mostly ignores Vollbracht's collections, and the other influential editorial voice, Women's Wear Daily, is often lukewarm.

"Women respond to what I do," he says. "I'm consumer-driven. I like seeing women wearing these clothes. That's the reward."

In New York, he lives in a cozy three-story carriage house the length and width of one room, with a terrace he has filled with bamboo to muffle the city sounds. But Vollbracht says New York doesn't have the allure for him it had 20 years ago.

"I don't socialize much," he says. "I lost hundreds of friends to AIDS in the '80s. New York isn't the same." So Vollbracht's emotional compass directs him to Safety Harbor when he wants to go home, to a plain house he has made glamorous with creativity and sweat. Despite the rise in his fortunes, he has made few changes to the place, filled with salvaged architectural objects, art by friends and wall treatments he created with paint bought at the "oops" bin in Home Depot.

A hallway wall is dominated by a large Chinese painting on silk he bought years ago at the Spence School Thrift Store in New York, "for about $200, all I had at the time."

A bedroom wall is lined with prints, including one by Monet, bought on the cheap. A huge old Louis Vuitton trunk he found abandoned on an Upper East Side sidewalk has been upended to serve as a stand for a huge ceramic bowl found at another thrift store.

Vollbracht was always considered a gifted illustrator as well as designer, long sought after by magazines such as New Yorker.

Art is no longer a commercial venture but an escape.

"I have to get away from fashion sometimes," Vollbracht says, "although I'm a very good designer. I'm only an okay artist."

Still, a series of 20 collages debuted Dec. 8 at a Manhattan gallery. The works are filled with ephemera put together with the same eccentric charm he displayed in Nothing Sacred, a sort of memoir he published in 2000 with a forward written by Blass. The only painting of his in his Safety Harbor house is the one he did for the book's cover, a portrait of Elizabeth Taylor.

"I would do anything for her," Vollbracht says. "She and Bill stuck by me through everything."

Vollbracht is looking beyond his peripatetic success.

"I have seven more years doing this, tops," he says of his fashion career. "Then I'll come back here. Home."

- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

[Last modified December 9, 2005, 08:25:05]