Portrait of a New Life : Fast-track designer Michaele Vollbracht traded in the glitter of Manhattan for a Floridaswamp. Now his art is back in the limelight.
With no shred of evidence, Michaele Vollbracht’s former colleagues nonetheless assume the worst.
“They think I’m dead, they really think I’m dead,” hoots the one-time hotshot clothing designer, who left high fashion and Manhattan five years ago to reinvent his life.
He disappeared without a trace, he says, after his business failed, his fame waned, his friends started dying of AIDS.
He was 39 and penniless when he bought a one-way ticket out of town.
Fast-forward to the Vollbracht of the ‘90s.
He is speaking from his swamp--two Florida acres bordered by babbling brooks and rife with rattlers, ‘gators and herons. Leaves rustle symphonically as a stiff breeze sweeps in off the Gulf. His “big ol’ Buick” is out back; a fax beeps merrily. The house is strewn with tools of his new trade: easels, canvas, paints.
Vollbracht, 44, is in everyday attire: khaki cut-offs and T shirt. Even his sneakers are low on the Status Scale: Converse tennies.
“Who needs high fashion?” he asks. “What could be better than the Gap?”
If you’d told him eight years ago that he’d settle in a place called Safety Harbor with neighbors who tote rifles in their pickups, “I’d have said you were nuts,” he chuckles.
And if you’d told him that at age 39 he’d switch from making clothes full time to making art, which is how he’s earned his living the past five years, he’d have downright disagreed.
Yet his drawings appear in the New Yorker, his celebrity portraits and renderings of flowers, birds and “beasties” are in private collections and are exhibited on both coasts. (A show of his work starts Nov. 19 at Melrose Place Antiques; proceeds go to Paws, a group that cares for the pets of people with AIDS.)
Some days, he says, he wakes up amazed that he isn’t making clothes any more. He’d been at it since age 13, when his design for “bloomalottes” (a combination of bloomers and culottes) sold (briefly) at department stores.
He won a Coty Award in 1980, along with Perry Ellis. And, for a few brief shining years, he was a hot property and celebrity himself.
Looking back, he thinks his happy change of life might be inspirational for others, especially now that careers are toppling everywhere.
He says philosophically: “If the first road you travel leads to a dead end, there’s probably another road to take that you didn’t even realize was there.”
In the old days, he says, an ordinary week included fittings with private clients like Mia Farrow, Dionne Warwick, Elizabeth Taylor. And promotional visits to stores like I. Magnin and Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills, where his bold graphics on silk, caftan-like creations were picked by rich--if not always thin--women.
His name was on towels, sheets, sunglasses. His social whirl was out of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” He shook hands and broke bread with rock stars, film stars, politicos at an unending chain of New York’s elite “insider’s” restaurants and clubs. Even his childhood idols became accessible to him. “I drank with Joan Crawford; Bette Davis, in her Prince Valiant hairdo, came to tea with me.”
On the down side: constant ego collisions, an endless money crunch and the insecurity of being in a business where one bad season can put out your lights.
He remembers being hired, and then fired, by New York design dean Geoffrey Beene, “because my clothes didn’t sell.”
He remembers the extravagant fashion show launch of a Las Vegas mall, for which America’s top designers were asked to bring outfits from their new collections. Vollbracht had no collection, since he was temporarily out of business. So his model wore a drift of red satin embellished with a bold, black graphic design.
“It wasn’t a dress at all,” he chuckles. “I took a red satin bedsheet from my home, painted a black design and cut a hole for the model’s head. “Nobody seemed to know the difference.”
He remembers regretfully that, “living in a city of sharks,” he sometimes acted like one himself:
After Elizabeth (then Mrs. John Warner) Taylor generously offered to bankroll him when he’d lost his backers, Vollbracht thanked her by defecting to Joanna (then Mrs. Johnny) Carson.
“I always adored Elizabeth Taylor,” he says, “and she asked nothing of me, except that I provide her with some clothes.”
A good deal, right? Not good enough for him.
Vollbracht says he left Taylor and in 1981 signed on Carson’s dotted line because “the Carsons were Hollywood people, which might get me into costumes, which is what I always wanted to design.”
In 1985, two years after the Carson divorce, the designer and his backer split and his funds were severed.
(Luckily for him, he says, Taylor is too nice to hold a grudge. She invited him to her Disneyland birthday bash this year.)
With no high-price collection in fancy stores, Vollbracht’s name was useless on other goods. So his franchise income dried up, too.
With nowhere left to turn, Vollbracht says, he “became a recluse,” spending all his time doing what he loved best: art. In 1985, he produced a book, “Nothing Sacred,” composed of portraits and written memories of famous people he’d met.
The book solidified his idea that art was a road he could have taken from the very start--when he arrived in Manhattan at 17 to study at Parsons School of Design.
In those years, the starving student from Quincy, Ill., painted backdrops for elegant store windows, and his design for a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag was so riveting that it was written about in the New York Times.
He started drawing at 5, he recalls, when he got a Carmen Miranda coloring book. From then on, he lived through his crayons--his only constant friends as his military family moved from town to town.
In high school, teachers supported his talents and encouraged him to apply to Parsons.
“Like Holly Golightly, I really did have a battered cardboard suitcase with all my worldly goods when I left Shawnee Mission, Kan., for New York.”
To this day, Vollbracht sees himself as the “outsider” and prefers to call himself a designer rather than an artist. “If others call me that I’m thrilled, but it’s not for me to say.”
The New Yorker’s editors evidently thought his talents worthy of display. After his final business debacle, Vollbracht started getting calls to do portraits--people like designer Halston, photographer Horst and jet-setter Tina Chow.
“They knew who I was, knew I was available and I guess many of their regular artists were dead of AIDS. (It is one of his many references to the disease that has killed so many of his friends, including Chow and Halston, and a cause for which he regularly raises funds.)
Since Tina Brown’s arrival at the magazine in July, his color collage of En Vogue and a portrait of film director Michaelangelo Antonioni have appeared.
Art editor Chris Curry says, “There’s something very classy about everything Vollbracht does.”
Designer Bob Mackie says he’s been a big fan of Vollbracht’s art from the start.
“In the early ‘70s I’d see his paintings in store windows and stop in my tracks; I didn’t know who he was, but I knew his work was phenomenal.” Now Mackie’s an even bigger fan. “In my New York apartment I have a huge Vollbracht painting that dominates the entire room.”
These days, Vollbracht says, his usual companions are a dog named Tequila and five cats.
“I live by the fax and Federal Express. In this line of work, that’s all I need.”
He could never think of living in New York again now that he’s found such serenity, he says. “But then again, I get bored easily. . . . I live a charmed life. I am alive when many friends are dead. I am happy when many are miserable. If I died tomorrow, I’d have no regrets.”
