Today marks what would have been Rudi Gernreich’s 100th birthday. A dancer-turned-designer, Gernreich’s designs were intensely body-focused and freeing, and noticeably lacking in prudery.
“As if I invented nudity,” the designer remarked to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1964, on the subject of his famous breast-baring monokini. It’s mind boggling that more than half a century later Gernreich’s most iconic design is unpostable on Instagram with its institutionalised nipple ban. Though provocative then and now, there is a rigour to the design of Gernreich’s monokini that is akin to that of Achille Castiglioni’s Arco Lamp, which was designed just a few years earlier.
Born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Gernreich was introduced to fashion through his aunt, who had a dress shop. In 1938, he escaped Europe with his mother and settled in California. He studied modern dance with Lester Horton from 1939 to 1944 (making costumes along the way). After his dance career, he got a job styling and doing advertising for Hoffman California Fabrics. In 1947, he designed dresses as a fabric promotion that were so well received he went on to develop a capsule collection.
Discovering his designs weren’t fit to go into production, Gernreich learned the trade and worked for designers on the West Coast and Seventh Avenue before designing a line for Walter Bass. His early successes were the knitted bathing suits he presented in 1953 for Westwood Knitting Mills. These won him his first awards which kept coming as he developed as a designer.
With his trained dancer knowledge of the relationship between fabric and body, clothing and movement, Gernreich’s clothes were never constricting. They always came “back-to-nature,” as one contemporary journalist put it. “A true contemporary,” reads a 1955 Joseph Magnin ad, “Rudi Gernreich mixes textures, colours and bulk with slenderness. He dares you to try his art and then makes you feel completely exciting and new when you have.”
Establishing RG Designs in 1960, Gernreich named American visionaries Claire McCardell and Martha Graham as major influences, explaining that they taught him the “common denominator of all forms of design… rhythmic simplicity. ” He achieved this syncopation through proportion, colour mixes and sometimes, op-like patterns and prints, and all with soft fabrics. But Gernreich didn’t think of himself as a conductor, rather he believed that the wearer brought the clothes, or music, to life.
At first the casual, active and outdoorsy aspects of his designs were associated with California, which had a booming fashion industry in those days. They also anticipated the sportswear separates that defined the ’70s, but overall Gernreich’s work is an expression of the young and free and non-conformist ’60s spirit. “Fashion does come up from the streets now,” he told the Tribune-Gannett News Service in 1967. “Young people are saying ‘We are people, not men and women.’ There’s no sexual confusion. It’s a social change.”
In 1964, Gernreich launched a revolution from within, creating the No-Bra bra for Exquisite Form. At the time, brassieres were heavy-duty artillery that imposed a shape. Gernreich’s second-skin design was made of sheer, bias-cut nylon net with spaghetti-thin straps (though they only ran to size 34B). The idea was to follow the natural form of the body. Over time, Gernreich would chip away at that, introducing stick-on vinyl patches, thongs and later advocating for no underpinnings. “As a designer, he’s one of the most powerful forces in American fashion and probably the greatest enemy that modesty has,” noted an author at the time. Gernreich had not only introduced the monokini, but was big on miniskirts, and made liberal use of cut-outs, all of which were well worn by his muse Peggy Moffitt.
In 1968, Gernreich took a year’s sabbatical. Returning to the business, he started to focus more and more on interiors and food, reducing his fashion output somewhat. When he did work on clothes his interest was in comfort, authenticity and unisex dressing. Ever forward thinking, he experimented with Fused Fashion, featuring seams secured by sound, heat, and lasers, according to The Daily Press.
Meanwhile, he railed hard against the retrograde leanings that were taking over fashion. “Nostalgia worries me. It’s a drug,” he told The San Francisco Examiner in 1974. “Nostalgia is a false kind of security, a search into the past because we are afraid of the present and the future. Watergate and world turmoil are part of it as people try to retreat into history. It is also part of a revolt against the de-humanising aspects of technological progress. But is it not realistic and I will continue to resist romanticising the past.”
Gernreich was true to his word. Who now will follow in his footsteps and try to break nostalgia’s hold on fashion and culture? Please step forward.
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