Fabulous Dead People | Rudi Gernreich

Rudi Gernreich (1922-1985) is a great example of how far we haven’t come. Forty-six years after he introduced the monokini, public beaches in America are still scrubbed clean of naked breasts. Women who want to seem enlightened and “European” but are no more likely to air their chests than install a dance pole in their basements are lucky. The law gives them cover. Impress your friends! Keep your clothes on! It’s never been easier.

There are no topless swimsuits in the April 21 auction of Gernreich designs at Leslie Hindman in Chicago, but there are fireworks; they just won’t get you arrested. Even if the knit coatdress goes for the high estimate of $900, it may be a good deal: an identical one brought $1,245 in 2008 at Christie’s. Doyle’s holds the record for Gernreich, set in 2002: $8,500 for two minidresses with peekaboo vinyl inserts.

Vinyl was one of the many elbows that the Austrian-born Gernreich thrust in the side of French couture, which he loathed for the physical restrictions it imposed on women. There were other jabs: body decals, thong bathing suits, a trippy palette and the “no-bra bra” that torpedoed the torpedo look. Giraffe-spotted panties matched the suit, which matched the shoes, which matched the tights. Then there were all those minis. What the Hindman catalog calls a tunic is actually a dress. When Gernreich designed a mini, he meant it.

Twenty of the Gernreich lots on the block are from the collection of his muse and model. No, not that one. You’re thinking of Peggy Moffitt, the Van Dongen sylph with racoon eyes photographed by William Claxton in a monokini. No, it is Leon Bing, who is letting her Rudis go. Bing is one of fashion’s great second acts. With “Do or Die,” her account of infiltrating muderous teen gangs, she remodeled herself as a gritty nonfiction writer. In “Swans and Pistols,” a rather pungent memoir, she recalls how she, Moffitt and Gernreich appeared on the cover of “Time” in 1967. One naturally wonders how it works when two muses attend the same designer. A long, loud silence followed when I asked Bing about her relationship with Moffitt. “Peggy was an exemplary model,” she said eventually. They can both be found on YouTube in “Basic Black,” regarded as the first, all-Gernreich fashion video. If you miss the charm and naïveté of the ’60s, it will just about do you in.

An only child born in Vienna, Gernreich had a privileged but anguished youth. He was 8 when his father, a hosiery manufacturer, committed suicide. Gernreich learned the grammar of feminine adornment in his aunt’s dress shop. “He told me about his first childhood images of sexuality,” Bing writes, “leather chaps with a strap running between the buttocks of street laborers’ work pants and the white flesh of women’s thighs above gartered black stockings.” Following the 1938 Anschluss, Gernreich and his mother fled to Los Angeles as Jewish refugees.

They survived on the pastries she baked and he sold door to door. Gernreich’s first job was washing cadavers for autopsy. “I grew up overnight,” he remembered in an essay by Marylou Luther in Moffitt and Claxton’s “The Rudi Gernreich Book.” “I do smile sometimes when people tell me my clothes are so body-conscious I must have studied anatomy. You bet I studied anatomy.”

Captivated by Martha Graham, Gernreich joined the Leslie Horton Modern Dance Troupe from 1942 to 1948. Three years later, having been convicted in an entrapment case, he became one of the five original members of the Mattachine Society, the gay-rights organization founded by Harry Hay, then his lover. But Gernreich never declared himself publicly. He did not come out, as it were, until after his death, when his estate and that of his partner of 31 years, Oreste Pucciani, provided an endowment for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Gernreich finally hung out his shingle in 1952. Soon after, he met Pucciani, who as chairman of the U.C.L.A. French department was instrumental in bringing Sartre to the attention of American academics. Obviously, the two were not your average fashion household.

The furniture in their Hollywood Hills crib was by Eames, Van der Rohe, Bertoia and Rudi himself. Under license, he designed tables that resembled doors and crates, arranging them on squares of burnished leather sewn together to make luxurious floor coverings. For his friend Pucciani, the photographer George Hoyningen-Huene conceived a “floating” reflecting pool. Bing called the place a “walled fortress,” a reference to her boss’s mania for privacy.

On page after after page of “The Rudi Gernreich Book,” its short (5-foot-6) subject with the chiseled head and full toupee looks borderline grumpy, the opposite of the burn-the-candle-at-both-ends caricature of a dressmaker in the Halston mold. Well, Gernreich did take his job seriously. But when he showed his last collection, in 1981, it was clear he had overstayed his welcome. By then, Gernreich only resonated with people who could make a dime slapping his name on some irrelevancy. Bing wishes he had gotten out earlier, so there would be no evidence he once donned a chef’s toque to promote a line of soups. Gernreich’s taste for wigs and jumpsuits wasn’t doing him any favors either. Posing with a model wearing his pubikini, a garment whose name should leave nothing to the imagination, he looked like Tracy Ullman as a porn entrepreneur.