Rudi Gernreich: A Fashion Revolutionary

Who was Rudi Gernreich? The short answer is a fashion icon who played a key role in the gay rights movement, revolutionized swimsuits, anticipated the waxing trend of the 21st century and made millions of women happier with undergarments that freed them from the Jayne Mansfield-style bullet bra of the 1950s.

After moving away from fashion in the early '80s, this futurist even beat the crowd on today's gourmet food movement, creating his own line of specialty soups.

He also made the cover of Time, guest-starred on TV's "Batman," launched a signature scent packaged in a laboratory beaker, designed furniture and invented the ... thong.

While millions have worn his other pieces, the Vienna-born Californian is best remembered for a creation almost no one had the courage to buy, much less put on: the monokini. The black-and-white Vogue photo of Gernreich model and muse Peggy Moffitt slouching in his topless swimsuit has become one of the iconic images of the 1960s.

"The monokini came out in 1964, the same year the birth control pill became available to all women. That's when the '60s really began: 1964," says Patrick Hughes, associate professor of fashion history and design strategies at Parsons The New School for Design.

Yet only a few museums have celebrated his work, one of which is LA's Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Its 2012 exhibit "The Total Look: The Creative Collaboration Between Rudi Gernreich, Peggy Moffitt, and William Claxton," was curated by Fashion Historian Cameron Silver (owner of the vintage boutique Decades and star of Bravo's "The Dukes of Melrose") with help from Moffitt. An expanded version of "The Total Look" opens February 2015 in Cincinnati.

Captured onstage by Michael Urie ("Ugly Betty") in a play chronicling his days as an activist and celebrated in 1999's "The Rudi Gernreich Book," a fun, insightful - though sadly out of print - coffee table book created by Moffitt and her late husband, photographer William Claxton, it's surprising that no full-length biography of this significant artist exists.

And though his fame peaked in the late 1960s, Gernreich's influence is still felt throughout many areas of fashion and design, more so than more familiar names.

"Gernreich is not a household name, but he's always been a popular designer for other designers to study," says Silver. "There's a tremendous amount of depth to Rudi Gernreich as a person. In a sense there should be a mythology built up around him, and there isn't."

Treacherous Childhood, Dangerous Escape

Gernreich's personal story is as fascinating as his contributions to fashion.

Playwright Jon Marans researched the designer's early life for his 2009 play "The Temperamentals," which documents the early years of America's gay rights movement.

He was born in 1922 to a comfortable Viennese family with strong ties to the fashion industry. His father - who committed suicide when his son was only 8 - was a stocking manufacturer. His aunt ran a dress shop, Marans says, adding, "Perhaps because of his father's death, he was aware of how short life could be."

The family's life took another dramatic turn in 1938, when the Nazis invaded Austria. "Rudi, his mother and aunt got out after the Anschluss," says Marans. "Many family members died in concentration camps. By the time he got out, the rights of Jews had been stripped. He saw his grandmother sweeping the streets of Vienna. He was 16."

Gay Activist in McCarthy's America

After escaping Austria, Gernreich moved to Southern California, where he pursued a career in choreography as a member of the Leslie Horton Modern Dance Troupe and held a number of jobs (including washing cadavers for autopsies in a morgue) before focusing on fashion.

Gernreich also was a quiet but integral part of a small circle behind the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights group organized by Gernreich and his lover Harry Hay, a lifelong political activist who later founded the Radical Fairies.

"What I think is interesting about him is that a lot of things made him see the world differently. He was a visionary, ahead of his time in every way," says Marans, whose play recounted Hay and Gernreich's struggles as they founded the group. "He was ahead of his time in the way he saw homosexuality and how people should be more open about 'these things.' He just assumed that 'that' should be the way the world was and that the world just needed to catch up."

Though he never publicly "came out," after his relationship with Hay ended Gernreich spent three decades sharing a home with partner Oreste Pucciani, chairman of UCLA's French Department.

Fashion's Future Foretold

Reticent, though certainly effective, during his activist day, Gernreich's true legacy stems from his contributions to fashion. From the 1950s through the 1970s, he was ahead of the curve, anticipating the bold, aggressive colors and synthetic fabrics of the 1960s during the pastel '50s, as well as 1980s androgyny and today's fitness culture as early as 1970. Though never a follower, his aesthetic mixed perfectly with the youth-oriented fashion culture of the 1960s.

Most of his life as a designer was spent in Southern California, where the laid-back beach esthetic influenced his work. After working for former MGM designer Adrian (think Joan Crawford's shoulder pads) in the late 1940s and women's wear A-lister Hattie Carnegie in the early 1950s, Gernreich teamed up with a number of synthetic fabric manufacturers, including Harmon, creating innovative clothing for both sexes.

"He was doing menswear in the 1950s, before other designers were doing both mens- and womenswear lines," says Alessandro Esculapio, an associate professor at Parsons and contributor to the book "Just Fashion: Critical Cases on Social Justice in Fashion."

Gernreich ran his own company from 1960 through 1968, and, after folding the business, continued as a trendsetting designer through the mid '70s, presenting his last collection in 1981. Known for body-conscious clothing that followed a natural line, Gernreich's innovations included:

� A white vinyl evening dress at the height of the conservative '50s (1954).
� Bathing suits with cutouts (1961).
� The "No Bra" bra, a soft-cup, lightweight, seamless, sheer nylon and elastic bra (1964), and its follow-up, the "No-Side Bra" (1965), both manufactured by the delightfully named Exquisite Form.
� Dresses with transparent vinyl inserts (1968).
� The modern tattoo craze, which he anticipated by pasting triangles, circles and other shapes over the exposed skin of bikini-clad models (1966).
� The "Trapeze Dress," which Gernreich introduced before Yves St. Laurent made it famous.
� A sweater sewn directly onto a dress, his ironic/pragmatic response to Halston's line featuring a cardigan wrapped around the shoulders (early 70s).
� The first Jockey-style briefs for women (1976), predating Calvin Klein's creations by seven years.
� A gourmet soup line, launched in 1982, a few years before his death and decades before "foodie" became a noun.

Well before Halston made a deal with JCPenney and Isaac Mizrahi created designs exclusively for Target, Gernreich anticipated the now ubiquitous collaborations between designers and department stores, signing with Montgomery Ward in 1966 to produce a group of exclusive pieces for the chain.

He also became among the first prestigious fashion designers to decry the price of designer clothing. "Today, 'expensive' is what 'cheap' used to be: the hallmark of an inveterate vulgarity," Gernreich said in the early 1970s.

Silver adds that Gernreich's concept of "The Total Look" (coordinated fashion from head to toe) wasn't original, but his "democratic" determination to make his work more affordable was trendsetting.

A New Plastic Age

Hughes believes Gernreich's influence can be seen in runway shows for Spring 2015 lines. "Today, there is a lot of nostalgia for pioneering materials. We're seeing a lot of hardcore plastic on the runways. Lagerfeld is doing plastic purses that look like old Walkmen, and Daks [a London-based fashion line] features a clear plastic raincoat."

"There are so many designers that are doing plastic for 2015," he says.

Hughes positions Gernreich as insightful American contributor to England's Youth Quake movement of the mid 1960s, led by England's Mary Quant, creator of the miniskirt, and Paco Rabanne in Europe. "They were exploring the possibilities of what you could make clothing out of," he says, explaining that the trend began with incorporating Dacron, Rayon, Lycra, Spandex and other synthetic fibers into easy-care designs and then moved on to plastic.

"His [Gernreich's] incorporation of plastic in his designs is just wonderful," he says.
A fashion as well political rebel, Hughes says traditionalists were up in arms when Gernreich won the prestigious Coty Hall of Fame Award in 1967, beating out the staid John Moore, a favorite designer of Lady Bird Johnson. While the First Lady was wearing Moore, Carol Channing attended Lynda Bird Johnson's White House wedding in a Gernreich bubble skirt with matching tights.

"I thought it was what you wear to a wedding in the year 1967," Channing told Newsweek.

"He was a rebel in the American market, challenging the older school," says Hughes. "He was a departure from that kind of thinking."

Shaving Hair and Showing Some Skin

One vital aspect of Gernreich's legacy is his anticipation of a move toward a more androgynous, gender-blending unisex fashion, epitomized by the "Dress Codes" spread he created for the January 1970 issue of Life, along with a handful of subsequent live shows, in which he shaved the bodies and heads of his male and female models before dressing them in identical outfits.

"He believed in freeing women's bodies and that women should not be viewed as sexual objects," Esculapio says. "The monokini and the Life photo shoot were both expressions of that, a movement toward more homogenous clothing."

"What he was showing was really futuristic in a way. It was radical in that he was showing clothing that was neither male nor female. I do believe a fashion shoot like that would be interesting in today's fashion landscape," he emphasizes. "It would still create a tremendous amount of discussion today, if not a scandal."

And "futuristic" could describe many of Gernreich's designs of the 1960s and '70s, from his runway creations to the form-fitting jumpsuits he created for stars Martin Landau, Barbara Bain and the cast of cult TV favorite "Space: 1999."

"Baby make your booty go ... "

Though Gernreich is identified with the monokini the way Chanel is with the "little black dress," it's the "posterities" of his T-back swimsuit (or "thong") that we still see on beaches from Fire Island to Corcovado.

"Gernreich had a background in dance, and the T-back was based on the male dancers' belts they wore underneath their costumes," Hughes says. "Again, he was ahead of his time, because it anticipated the aerobics and "Flashdance" movements of the late '70s and '80s."

As early as 1970, the impish soothsayer anticipated the fitness revolution. "The aesthetics of fashion are going to involve the body itself. We will train the body to grow beautifully rather than cover it to produce beauty," Gernreich wrote.

Still Trending

Esculapio says Gernreich's avant-garde influence not only intrigues nostalgia buffs interested in the swinging '60s, but earnest young designers too. "My students are fascinated by the experimental aspects of his work. Last year I received many final papers on Rudi Gernreich."

Silver sums up the designer's timelessness this way, "The walkaway from our exhibit was that he was such modernist that every piece in the collection could be worn today."

Perhaps the best explanation of his appeal can be found in this quote from the designer himself.

"We have discovered that nakedness isn't necessarily immoral, that it can have a logical and decent meaning. The body is a legitimate dimension of human reality and can be used for a lot of things besides sex. Slowly, the liberation of the body will cure our society of its sex hangup. Today our notions of masculine and feminine are being challenged as never before. The basic masculine-feminine appeal is in people, not in clothes. When a garment becomes sufficiently basic, it can be worn unisexually."