• New York, New York Times, Tuesday, December 30, 2008 10:45 AM

NextCen was looking for $25 million for the Bill Blass brand but has settled for $10 million in a fire sale to Peacock International Holdings LLC, a men's dress shirt and neckwear company. "Like every pair of Manolos in this town, they had to mark it waaaaay down to get it out the door," Amy Odell reports in New York's fashion-industry blog, "The Cut."

NexCen shut down the Bill Blass ready-to-wear line on Dec. 19, two months after Peter Som left as head designer, reportedly over frustrations that NexCen didn't know how to run a designer brand.

Last Thursday, The New York Times' Eric Wilson covered the unraveling of the once high-flying brand following its sale by the ailing Blass in 1999. "There is no shortage of explanations for the label's demise," he writes. "There was an aging clientele, a management that seemed to take a freewheeling approach to the brand and its failure to find a successor who could match the Blass persona."

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