Michael Vollbracht, fashion designer and illustrator, dies at 71

If you had designs on acquiring status in late 1970s New York City, you would have likely been spotted around town toting a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag identifiable only by the splashy artwork on its side.

A partial profile of a woman with towering cheekbones rendered in red, black and gray, the illustration was the brainchild of Michael Vollbracht, an artist, illustrator and fashion designer whose work came to encapsulate that heady time.

Vollbracht’s runway creations drew crowds and reaped accolades. But it’s that bag, stowed in the archive at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, and commanding high prices on eBay, that remains etched in many people’s consciousness, a vibrant expression of its creator, who died on Thursday at 71 at his home in Safety Harbor, Florida. Roberta Greene, his former publicist and a longtime friend, said the cause was esophageal cancer.

In designing for, and capturing on canvas, the images of clients and admirers like Elizabeth Taylor, Paloma Picasso and Diana Vreeland, Vollbracht came to symbolize the unfettered giddiness, extravagance and glamour of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“He was our very own John Galliano,” designer Jeffrey Banks said, referring to the flamboyant British couturier.

But Vollbracht’s aesthetic, Banks noted, was equally shaped by the designers he idolized, an American pantheon that included Pauline Trigère, Norman Norell and Bill Blass, whose label Vollbracht briefly took over in the early 2000s.

“He was above all a true creative,” Greene said. “He looked at a fabric, a space, an idea, and he built it into something greater and more beautiful.”

Vollbracht’s designs, and particularly his evening wear, were not conceived for his most retiring clients. A fall collection shown in 1982 at the crest of his runway career was replete with fluid jumpsuits, caftans and billowing gowns executed in rainbow patterns and screen prints interspersed with high-visibility graphics and the occasional bird of paradise.

“They have a lot of power and are different from anything anybody is doing anywhere else,” New York Times fashion writer Bernadine Morris wrote at the time.

Those screen-printed images were his signal contribution to the world of style, said Freddie Leiba, a prominent fashion editor and stylist and Vollbracht’s frequent collaborator.

In his artworks and catwalk creations, Vollbracht had many different styles, some realistic, some fantastical.

“He loved to mixed mediums,” said Banks, who worked with Vollbracht, “and his work, it was almost like a collage. Ink, pastels, pencil—all combined in the same drawing, and a mix of textures, shiny and dull.

“Virtually every print that he designed and had printed was engineered for that specific dress or coat,” Banks continued. “It was like seeing an art show and a whole fashion collection combined.”

Vollbracht’s shows were theatrical events. Some of his more over-the-top productions featured Eskimos, American Indian chiefs and, in one scandalizing instance, a troupe of G-stringclad dancers from the Chippendales all-male revue.

As he himself once said, he looked at the world in cinematic frames, his aesthetic shaped by the long afternoons he had spent in the movie houses of his hometown, the Mississippi River city of Quincy, Illinois, where he sat transfixed by the likes of Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Claudette Colbert.

Later in life he befriended a handful of Hollywood stars, Elizabeth Taylor chief among them. Vollbracht once told of joining Taylor in her hotel room and luxuriating with her on her bed surrounded by millions of dollars worth of jewels.