Rosie Scott Blog about Women

It was called the “monokini,” but it entered the culture, in 1964, as the “topless swimsuit.” It was not designed to titillate teenage boys but to express feminist freedom—to take the erogenous and make it androgynous. And it came to fame not on the runway but in a head-on photograph that is now immortal: The impossibly stylized model Peggy Moffitt, quiet as a classical nude, wears a black wool tank suit cropped just under the bust, her wet Vidal Sassoon haircut like a crow’s wing in the rain.

Fashion magazines wouldn’t touch the subject, so Women’s Wear Daily ran the photo—a global shock that was denounced by the Vatican. That shot, Ms. Moffitt said in 2012, “took 1/60th of a second to do. Now, imagine having to spend the rest of your life talking about it.” The man who designed the monokini, the fearlessly futuristic Rudi Gernreich, has likewise been distilled into that topless moment, which is also a bit of a shock. On the evidence of “The Total Look: The Creative Collaboration Between Rudi Gernreich, Peggy Moffitt and William Claxton”—an exhibition that was at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and has been remounted at the Cincinnati Art Museum—Gernreich was not just continuously original, he was frequently visionary.

John Fairchild, the former editor of WWD (who died last month at 87), called Gernreich “the greatest of the beatnik designers,” praise that shortchanges him historically but catches his outsider status. Gernreich (1922-1985) was born in Vienna and became acquainted with fashion in his aunt’s dress shop. When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, he and his mother escaped to Los Angeles, where he would settle. In the 1940s, Gernreich vacillated between fashion and dance, apprenticing for a time with a clothing manufacturer on New York’s Seventh Avenue and then performing with Lester Horton’s modern dance troupe, for which he also designed costumes. Gernreich stopped dancing in 1952 and embraced fashion full time, designing knitwear and swimwear for various West Coast companies and his own line for the Beverly Hills boutique JAX. In 1960, just in time for the decade he would play a large part in defining, Gernreich founded his own company. Ignoring the elitist East Coast fashion establishment—too hidebound, too ladies-who-lunch—he was instead witty, arty and experimental. He chose to focus on the life inside the silhouette, the creature that needed to move au naturel.

The museum’s Curator of Fashion Arts and Textiles, Cynthia Amnéus, makes this point at the show’s entrance, with her grouping of “total look” ensembles from the mid-’60s. From head to toe to “glitten” (Gernreich’s mating of a glove and mitten), and with miniskirt suits and tunics in between, the many pieces of each ensemble—underwear as well—are all the same print or color. Tiger, giraffe, peacock—it’s as if these three leggy “grrrls” are stalking the savannah, looking for a discothèque. Always vocal about America’s joyless swing between puritanism and prurience, Gernreich saw human beings as part of the animal kingdom, a species like any other. A handful of his body-conscious imperatives are gathered in this grouping: flat shoes, always, because they allowed uninhibited locomotion; patterned tights matched to the dress, for a body unified; and fabrics with graphic impact, cut in simple shapes.

Gernreich’s most famous work was concentrated in the ’60s, but there are prescient early pieces in the exhibition. These possess the stiff structure that was de rigueur in ’50s couture and which American manufacturers demanded. Yet even while bowing to the trends of Paris, Gernreich was backing away. His Joan of Arc dress from 1955, a black wool shift quartered by a huge brown wool cross, foresees the bands of clear vinyl he would inset into dresses of the ’60s (a first). And the Trapeze dress, also from 1955—a sturdy little A-frame—predated Yves Saint Laurent’s Trapeze line for Dior (1958) by three years. Saint Laurent would get the credit for the Trapeze (as he would for the see-through blouse, which Gernreich showed four years before him), but by then Gernreich had moved on, done with stiff infrastructure and costly seam work. Gernreich wanted young people to wear his clothes. By equating simplicity and affordability with democracy he was commenting on all social structures that limited movement and freedom. He was, he said, “interested in clothes as sociological statements.”

Indeed, there’s something of the European naturist in Gernreich’s views on foundation garments—those postwar girdles and bullet bras—which he thought affronts to the female form. His No-Bra Bra of 1964, designed soon after the monokini and a big success, is a wisp of nylon and elastic—his humane answer to the boned and wired numbers that made a woman look, in his words, “like a Sherman tank.” The swimsuits in the exhibition, shorn of inner corseting, nod to Martha Graham’s woolen tubes of the ’30s even as they prophesy the braless ’70s to come. Gernreich understood, however, that figures change over the years. “If a body can no longer be accentuated,” he said, “it should be abstracted.” Hence his silk caftans—glamorous, minimalist, lightweight space capsules that put the focus on the face. Gernreich didn’t use women to express a grandiose personal aesthetic; he was attuned to them as equals.

His intense collaboration with Ms. Moffitt, which included her husband, William Claxton, the photographer who shot the monokini, speaks to a deep affinity built on equality. She animated Gernreich’s clothes, and in her heightened use of accessories and makeup (no one had fringier false eyelashes than Peggy) brought them to a plane of performance art. Gernreich and Ms. Moffitt were both alive to culture: he pulling Pop Art into his prints and color palette, suggesting the Wiener Werkstätte with his monochromatic stripes and checkerboards; she, intuitively theatrical, playing the Kabuki sorceress, Nijinsky’s faun, a Pierrot in silver paillettes. In fact, the exhibition lets us see Ms. Moffitt in action in a short film called “Basic Black.” It was created by Claxton, and features Ms. Moffitt and two other models prowling, prancing and dancing in many of the Gernreich pieces on exhibit. Made in 1967, 6:55 minutes of charm, “Basic Black” has a place in history, too, for no one had yet thought to make an art film that was only about fashion. Another first from the vivid world of Gernreich.

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