Constructor: Robyn WeintraubRelative difficulty: Easy
THEME: none Word of the Day: Bill BLASS (
1A: Bill for expensive clothing?) —
William Ralph Blass (June 22, 1922 – June 12, 2002) was an American fashion designer. He was the recipient of many fashion awards, including seven Coty Awards and the Fashion Institute of Technology's Lifetime Achievement Award (1999). // Blass was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the son of Ralph Aldrich Blass, a traveling hardware salesman, and his wife, Ethyl (Keyser) Blass. [...] In 1943, Blass enlisted in the Army. Due to his intelligence and talent, he was assigned to the 603rd Camouflage Battalion. Its mission was to deceive the German Army into believing the Allies were positioned in fake locations, for example by using dummy tanks. He served in this unit at several major operations including the Battle of the Bulge, and the Rhine River crossing. After the war, Blass returned to New York, and was promptly hired as Anne Klein's assistant. However, he was soon fired; allegedly, Anne told him that while he had good manners, he had no talent. He was a protégé of Baron Nicholas de Gunzburg. In 1970, after two decades of success in menswear and womenswear, he bought Maurice Rentner Ltd., which he had joined in 1959, and renamed it Bill Blass Limited.
Over the next 30 years he expanded his line to include swimwear, furs, luggage, perfume, and chocolate. In 1967, he was the first American couture fashion designer to start a menswear line. That part of his business grew to offer everything from ties, socks and belts to suits and evening clothes. It was made by 18 licensees.
Like many designers, his women's-couture collections lost money but served to promote other parts of his business. By the mid-1990s, his ready-to-wear business grossed about $9 million annually and his 97 licensing agreements had retail sales of more than $700 million a year.
His clients, many of whom were also his friends, included Happy Rockefeller, Brooke Astor, Nancy Kissinger, Jessye Norman, Gloria Vanderbilt and Patricia Buckley. (wikipedia)
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Well this was very easy, but while my solve was fast, the lack of resistance meant that I didn't feel the whoosh so much. There needs to be at least a little bit of struggle to make the revelation of a longer answer feel like I'm being catapulted into the grid, but today there was hardly any. Further, the grid layout was very conventional and blocky, in this way that seemed to inhibit the fireworks feeling when the longer answers went off. Don't get me wrong, it's an extremely smooth and entertaining puzzle—it just felt like there were slightly fewer marquee answers than I typically see from a Robyn puzzle, and the structure of the grid made it feel like I was spending more time plodding through 4's and 5's than I was whooshing about the grid. Still, there were at least four longer answers that made the journey feel worth it. The first was
SHORT SHORTS, with its buttocks-baring bravado (
6D: Cheeky attire?). I also like that if you head east at the end of the first SHORT you head straight into STORIES—it's like an L-shaped bonus answer! There's also a pun on the editor's name (SHORT SHORTZ!), and since
SHORT SHORTS intersects
TORTE, I'm now wondering about the existence of SHORT TORTES (and who eats them):
I think I was a little disappointed that a few longer answers were wasted today on mundane stuff like "
YESSIREE!" and
TAPAS BAR and
TITLE ROLES—not bad stuff, but not particularly sparkly stuff, and in the case of the first two answers, stuff I see a lot. Also—and this is not the puzzle's fault—I am in no mood to think about war at all right now, or prison, for that matter, and so
BATTLE PLAN and
STATE PEN did not lift me the way, say,
SHORT SHORTS did.
ORIGIN STORIES is a strong answer (
25A: Plot lines for many early Marvel films), but I find the superhero saturation of our culture dreary (Me watching a Marvel movie ad last night with the sound muted: ".... Are they all just the same movie? This looks like every other Marvel movie. How are people not tired of this yet!?"). But "
DON'T TEMPT ME!" went right into "
KEEP THE CHANGE!" went right into "
I LUCKED OUT!," and that trifecta alone is pretty special, and put the fun levels back where I expect them to be in a Robyn Weintraub puzzle.
If I struggled at all (and I didn't, really) it was in the short stuff, with stuff like LAMA (19A: Reincarnated one, maybe), and TIDE (33D: Pool maker), and SIRI (36A: Who talks on the phone a lot), and REMY, who I had as NEMO there for a bit (26D: Protagonist of Pixar's "Your Friend the Rat") (Me: "They put the fish in a rat movie? Bold."). I had to wait on the last two letters of SWEETIE (5D: Babycakes) because I thought it might somehow be SWEETUM, though now that I think about it, it's SWEETUMS, isn't it? The context for 42D: Leave sitting in a breeze, say also eluded me, so COOL took nearly every cross. "Oh, pie! They're talking about pie!" Turns out if you leave the "window sill" part out of your imagined pie-COOLing scenario, I cannot find the pie. Found the SW corner the toughest, as I couldn't get either AGENDAS (43A: Chairs usually have them) or DODGES (46A: Eludes) quickly from their back ends, and then I misspelled ENGLES (thusly) (41D: Philosopher Friedrich) and briefly forgot GAUL existed (54A: Land vandalized by the Vandals). If you issue a word of warning to the prospective buyer of your primitive living quarters concerning the weird wall paintings you've made in there, that's called a CAVEART. You know, a caveat about your CAVE ART. This is to be distinguished from the CAVIART you'll have to issue about the fish-egg sculpture you made that one time, and the smell it left behind. (Sorry, this is what happens when I wake up to write at 2 in the morning—I'll stop now. See you tomorrow.)
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. I did not fall into the “ELLEN” trap at
14A: Show that featured the first lesbian kiss on prime-time TV (1991) (“L.A.LAW”) because I had LAL- in place before I ever saw the clue, but I sympathize with those of you who weren’t so lucky.
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