Mr. Blackwell: The Original Red Carpet Bitch | Longform

If you’ve felt an inevitable downfall approaching, here it is. He’d already survived three suicide attempts and in the last 10 years of Mr. Blackwell’s life, the guy just wanted to be Richard Selzer again. He’d never made it as an actor, but he couldn’t shake his one great character. As he rounded 80, after four or five face-lifts (“If you squint I look twice as good,” he liked to say), he became obsessed with his legacy. “Who is Mr. Blackwell?” he would ask no one in particular.

It drove him mad that he was never recognized as more than the Liberace of fashion by the Vogue-verified New York establishment. “Blackwell would remind everyone that he had a best-dressed list, too, but no one would print it,” Boll says. He started to defend his worst-dressed list in interviews, veering from “I’m just being honest” to recasting his critiques as “a tremendous documentary of Americana.” Striving for legitimacy, he told the Chicago Tribune in 1991, “If someone doesn‘t make a statement...about these absolute obscenities in fashion, then half of America is going to clone them.”

He was right. Cloning was upon us. When Joan Rivers first stepped onto the red carpet at the Golden Globes in 1994 (joined by Melissa at the Oscars a year later), Blackwell’s star was dimming. His fate? A celebrity’s biggest fear—irrelevancy. “He would never admit it in public,” Boll says, “but, yeah, he always kind of felt like, ‘Joan and Melissa are stealing my act.’”

Blackwell began to exhibit his lists at the Hollywood Museum, speaking to backpacked tourists passing by on their way to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. “They would look at his worst-dressed lists, just shaking their heads,” founder Donelle Dadigan says. He developed Bell’s palsy in 2004 (Blackwell believed it was brought on by a face-lift), and his last appearance with the worst-dressed list was in 2005. His health rapidly declined in late 2007, and in January 2008 he would release the last list, his 48th. He died the following October, at age 86, of an intestinal infection. Hedren spoke at his funeral.

During Blackwell’s final year, he agonized about the meaning of his life’s work, even if he couldn’t bear to talk about bequeathing his list to an heir. “But,” Boll says gingerly, “the one person he liked was Tim Gunn.” Gunn, 61, the dapper mentor of Project Runway, had never heard this. “Oh, my goodness,” he says when contacted by EW. “I’m honored and flattered and, uh, uh...” Horrified? “Yes.” There’s just no need for the list anymore, Gunn says.

Ironically, Blackwell’s worst-dressed list destroyed the very thing it needed to survive: flaming-car-crash awards-show fashion disasters. Actresses today always just look so...appropriate. (When’s the last time you saw anything even close to Björk’s swan dress? Okay, Lena Dunham. But she’s the rare exception.) “When you think about Mr. Blackwell and Joan Rivers, may they rest in peace,” says Gunn. “They’re the reason the red carpet has become so safe and homogenized. No wonder no one wants to take a risk.”

Kathy Griffin is concerned too. The comedian, 54, who replaced Rivers as the host of Fashion Police last month, fretted about the dearth of bad gowns at this year’s Golden Globes. “I would love to see just one red carpet where not a single person was allowed to have a stylist,” she says. “It should be like the Tour de France. Also, there should be federal charges.”

We still watch. And judge. In the kindest view of history, Mr. Blackwell did, in a way, end up making the world a more beautiful place, even if his methods could be ugly. And his no-prisoners approach, revolutionary in his time, made him as big a star as his targets. As he often declared, “I’m only saying out loud what had been whispered.” The problem was that whispers went out of style.

Sidebar photos—Mr. Blackwell: Harlan Boll; Madonna: Kevin Mazur/Wireimage.com; Streisand, Welch: Ron Galella/Wireimage.com (2); Spears: Jeffrey Mayer/Wireimage.com; Taylor: Keystone/Getty Images; Andrews: Ron Galella/Wireimage.com; Cher: Julian Wasser/Wireimage.com; Lohan: Jean-Paul Aussenard/Wireimage.com; Parton: Tom Wargack/Wireimage.com; Goldberg; Kevin Mazur/Wireimage.com; Stern: Richard Drew/AP Images; Olsen: Michael Loccisano/Filmmagic.com

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