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Opinion: Bye Bye, Mr. Blackwell

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Mr. Blackwell [ne Richard Selzer of Brooklyn Heights] was the original Fashion Policeman, and he didn’t read anyone her rights -- he read her her wrongs.

His signature Worst Dressed List was bitchy-funny, Don Rickles Meets Dior, as sharp-edged as a pair of pinking shears, and everyone loved it, except the people who appeared on it -- and even they may have believed that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

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I have in my collection of defunct California couture labels a few that bear the bold black-on-white name Mr. Blackwell. Still, it wasn’t as a designer that he made his mark, but as the dreaded thumbs-down fashion arbiter.

I met him just once, in downtown LA, as he was advising some 1980s Miss California as she was dressed, coached and styled for the Miss America pageant. I remember a few things: that his clothes seemed much too old for a fresh, pretty young woman, that I was relieved that she, not I, was the object of his scrutiny, and this moment, which I recount from memory:

Mr. Blackwell, sardonically surveying the legs of the young woman, encased as they were in pantyhose of the standard color usually described as ‘’suntan,’’ declared:

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‘’My dear, those hose -- they’re just TOO Ann Sheridan.’

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