The Great Fashion Designers (22 page)

Further reading:
Mary Quant's autobiography,
Quant by Quant
(1965), is a must-read. Amy De la Haye's
The Cutting Edge; 50 Years of British Fashion
(1996) and Christopher Breward, David Gilbert and Jenny Lister's
Swinging Sixties: Fashion in London and Beyond 1955–1970
(2006) are good background.

Rudi Gernreich was a blast of fresh air in the fashion world of the 1950s and summed up the youthful irreverent spirit of the 1960s. His flair for self-publicity was matched by an enthusiasm—bordering on obsession—with being ahead of his contemporaries. That mix makes him a controversial figure in the history of fashion, but the global media furore over the creation of a topless swimsuit in 1964 has obscured this Californian designer's more significant achievements. As his long-term muse and friend Peggy Moffit put it, ‘I have always felt that Rudi's great talent was overlooked because of the headlines.'

In fact, Gernreich showed some reluctance to unveil his topless swimsuit, despite having predicted its emergence in 1962. He acknowledged that it was ahead of its time and had no plans to put it into production, until influential fashion editor Diana Vreeland urged him to do so. He was also haunted by the fear that Emilio Pucci, his rival on the other side of the Atlantic as torchbearer for youth-driven innovation, might beat him to it. Moffit, who modelled the suit in a celebrated photograph only published by trade newspaper
Women's Wear Daily
at the time, thought it was an unwise move in retrospect. ‘Rudi did the suit as a social statement,' she said in 1985. The suit, she emphasised, was about freedom and was not intended to be judged too literally. Gernreich's much more significant contribution to the evolution of fashion was taking forward the pioneering spirit of Claire McCardell's sportswear for a new generation, producing clothes that were unconstructed, unrestricting and, he always felt, liberating. He believed the couturiers of Paris produced clothes that constricted and trussed up women. Gernreich's mission was to set them free. With the creation of the so-called no-bra bra in 1965, made from soft transparent nylon with neither padding nor boning, he did just that.

He was born in 1922 in Vienna, Austria, a world away from the California that became his home as an adult. His father, Siegmund Gernreich, a hosiery manufacturer, committed suicide in 1930 when Gernreich was just eight, so he grew up under the watchful eye of his mother and his aunt, who ran a dress shop that he later described as a ‘sanctuary' from the austere world of interwar Vienna. Here, he could sketch to his heart's content and learn about clothes in a welcoming environment. Austrian influences popped up in his professional career years later in America: checkerboard trousers, memorably worn by Lauren Bacall in a shoot for
Life
in 1953, recall the geometrics of the Bauhaus movement. In 1938 the Austrian Anschluss with Adolf Hitler's Germany sparked a Jewish exodus from Vienna, and Gernreich and his mother were among those who chose California as their destination. Bizarrely, his first job in America was working in a mortuary. ‘I do smile sometimes when people tell me my clothes are so body-conscious I must have studied anatomy,' recalled Gernreich. ‘You bet I studied anatomy!'

More conventionally, he also studied art at Los Angeles City College. He then worked briefly in the publicity department at RKO Studios before becoming enthused about the world of dance and joining Lester Horton's West Coast troupe, inspired by the work of choreographer Martha Graham. His dance study was supplemented by freelance fabric design work for Hoffman California Fabrics in the mid-1940s. In 1950 he recognised that dance was not his future and left Lester Horton to move to New York for a job with George Carmel, a coat and suit company. Gernreich swiftly developed a profound dislike for the American garment trade's obsession with the word from Paris. ‘Everyone with a degree of talent—designer, retailer, editor—was motivated by a level of high taste and unquestioned loyalty to
Paris … After about six months, I began to vomit every time I thought about the imperiousness of it all,' he recalled. ‘I produced terrible versions of Dior. I was finally let go.' The early 1950s were a period of fits and starts for Gernreich, although a legendary meeting with Diana Vreeland at
Harper's Bazaar
in 1951 gave him some encouragement. ‘Who are you, young man?' she said. ‘You're very gifted.' Some degree of stability was established when he met Walter Bass, with whom Gernreich said he never got along. Nevertheless their business partnership lasted eight years, partly because Bass enticed Gernreich into signing a draconian seven-year contract. By the time it expired Gernreich was a star. His first gingham and cotton tweed dresses were snapped up by an influential shop in Los Angeles called Jax. In New York, buyers went into rhapsodies. Gernreich's flair for fresh, youthful, unconstricted sportswear struck a chord with buyers and fashion editors at a time when the influence of Paris was steadily diminishing.

Fashion magazines were emerging as ever-more important style arbiters, a phenomenon that Gernreich recognised earlier than many of his contemporaries and exploited to the full. In March 1952 he created the prototype for the first bra-free swimsuit in wool jersey with a tank top. His first magazine credit was in the February 1953 issue of
Glamour
, featuring a knitted tube dress which was a forerunner of the stretch minis of the late 1980s. Swimsuits really took off for him in 1955 through a deal with Westwood Knitting Mills, for whom he produced wool knitted and elasticated swimsuits. The late 1950s and 1960s were a golden period of creativity for Gernreich, who steadily expanded his business into a veritable empire. In 1956 he produced his first menswear designs, originally waiters' jackets for a Chinese restaurant, recreated as shirt jackets for the beach or home. A women's shoe collection for Ted Saval followed the next year, and stockings were added in 1959. Accessories were important to Gernreich, who believed in the concept of a total look.

The long-anticipated end of his contract with Walter Bass allowed Gernreich to launch his own company, G.R. Designs, in 1960. The youthful energy and bright colours of Gernreich's collections were a harbinger of the youthquake of the 1960s—Gernreich's hemlines were above the knee as early as 1961. From his headquarters at 8460 Santa Monica Boulevard, Gernreich worked fanatically hard, producing thumbnail sketches as a starting point and working them up later with fabric samples and colour swatches. Often, ideas would come to him just before waking or falling asleep, moments that had a profound mystic significance for him.
The New York Times
picked up on Gernreich's soaring profile, dubbing him ‘California's most successful export since the orange'.

But Gernreich's fellow designers, particularly on the east coast, were not so enthusiastic. When Gernreich won the Coty American Fashion Critics Award in June 1963, Norman Norell returned his own Hall of Fame Coty in protest. At the preparations for the Coty Award presentation, even critics who admired him thought a white lingerie satin trouser suit that he planned to include in the show was a little too louche for the times. The Coty jury asked him to withdraw it, a request in which he acquiesced in a rare moment of restraint.

In Europe, the designer who came closest to expressing Gernreich's spirit was Emilio Pucci, based in Italy. Both Pucci and Gernreich had predicted that breasts would be uncovered within a few years. Peggy Moffit believes competition with Pucci prompted Gernreich to move fast, but he was also encouraged by fashion editors sensing a scoop. Gernreich himself later described the topless swimsuit as the natural extension of his cutout designs. ‘By 1964, I'd gone so far with swimwear cutouts that I decided the body itself—including breasts—could become an integral part of a suit's design.' Orders poured in for the controversial swimsuit, but across the United States store presidents stepped in to prevent the suits being delivered. One store was picketed, another had a bomb threat. Some 3,000 swimsuits were sold, although there is little evidence they were ever worn publicly, except by a club entertainer and a nineteen-year-old Chicago girl, Toni Lee Shelley, who was promptly arrested. The creation of the topless swimsuit made Gernreich a cause célèbre and media favourite for the rest of the career, alternately praised and mocked. All this tended to overshadow his more substantial achievements.

Although
Women's Wear Daily
had been quick to publish a photo of the swimsuit, publisher John
Fairchild dismissed Gernreich in his book
The Fashionable Savages
(1965), saying his clothes were badly constructed. By contrast, another critic, the designer Norman Norell, relented in 1966, acknowledging Gernreich's status as a major name in modern fashion design. It was a period of rich creativity for Gernreich with a series of firsts, both creative and commercial, ranging from the first fashion video (titled ‘Basic Black') and the first chain-store link-up (with Montgomery Ward) to the creation of the chiffon T-shirt dress. In October 1966, Gernreich's collection showed two looks: short hemlines and thoroughly swinging sixties styles, contrasted with long and dressed up. The designer was turning social commentator: there were no rights or wrongs in fashion any more—nor in society. In a statement published for his resort collection in the following year, he declared: ‘For the first time in the history of the world … the young are leading us. There is now a Power Elite of the young.' Once started on the social commentary path, Gernreich just could not stop. By 1968, he was pontificating on the film
Bonnie and Clyde
, castigating the period costume trend it inspired. ‘History must be used,' he said. ‘Not just restored.'

Gernreich's big theme by then was unisex dressing. ‘Today our notions of masculine and feminine are being challenged as never before,' he said. ‘The basic masculine-feminine appeal is in people, not clothes. When a garment becomes sufficiently basic, it can be worn unisexually.' Even the skirt was finished, he claimed, drawing a sharp rebuke from
Women's Wear Daily
, which said Gernreich had ‘boxed himself into a corner.' The barrage of interest in Gernreich became overwhelming for the designer, who announced in October 1968 that he was taking a year off and disappeared to Morocco and Europe. But he returned from the sabbatical as effervescent as ever, producing a unisex stripped-down look for a special futuristic issue of
Life
, photographed on male and female models with shaved heads and bodies (it was brought to life for Expo 70 in Osaka). By this stage, there was a sense that Gernreich was relying on gimmickry rather than creativity to keep his name in the spotlight, although many of his ideas were forerunners of trends of the 1980s and 1990s. The 1971 spring collection featured models carrying guns and wearing dog tags and combat boots. Gernreich became ever-more obsessed with technology, including spray-on clothes and the concept of transmigration of fabrics to the body. In 1971, he forecast that ‘the designer will become less artist, more technician … A knowledge of machinery such as computers will be essential.'

Home life for Gernreich was more measured. He lived in Laurel Canyon with his long-term partner, Oreste Pucciani, a professor of French. Interviewed in 1998, Pucciani commented that Gernreich ‘lived in an eternal present'. The designer himself once said, ‘I felt I had to be experimental at any cost, and that meant always being on the verge of a success or a flop.' His simplest and biggest innovation of the 1970s was probably the thong, a slim strip of fabric that became a best-selling piece of underwear for women by the end of the century. He also produced designs for furniture, rugs and kitchen accessories, plus a fragrance packaged in a chemist's beaker. In his final years, he became obsessed by the potential for gourmet soups and, in a parting gesture, produced the pubikini, photographed by Helmut Newton in 1985 shortly before his death from lung cancer. In the Newton photograph, this sliver of fabric left little to the imagination, revealing a triangle of the model's pubic hairs which Gernreich had dyed green. To the very end, Gernreich could not resist stirring up mischief.

Further reading:
The best summary of Gernreich's career is Cathy Horyn's ‘Naked Ambition' (May 1998), published in
Vanity Fair
. Former Gernreich model and muse Peggy Moffit collaborated with William Claxton on the well-illustrated
The Rudi Gernreich Book
(1991).

The two decades of the 1960s and 1970s were characterised by economic boom and bust. In the 1960s the post-war baby-boom generation provided both labour force and consumers for expanding old industries and vital new ones. Fashion was justifiably assertive, and many designers such as Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges adopted futuristic, sci-fi themes. The role model of the early years of the decade was Jacqueline Kennedy whose husband, President John F. Kennedy, committed America to the space race. The Council of Fashion Designers of America was founded in 1962 with
Norman Norell
as its first president. Swinging London fashion eclipsed Parisian couture and when Balenciaga closed his house in 1968, he declared its day was done. On the street gender distinctions were blurred as men became peacocks and women, leading more active, self-directed, so-called masculine lives, adopted trouser suits, jumpsuits, play suits and shorter and shorter miniskirts and shift dresses. The Pill generation felt free to flaunt its sexuality, to indulge in ‘free love' without consequences. However, for the sake of decency, tights supplanted stockings and suspenders. Fashion became strongly identified with the music scene; both were at the heart of the oppositional counterculture.