The Great Fashion Designers

by Brenda Polan

  22 RUDI GERNREICH (1922–1985)

  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).

  PART 4

  1960s–1970s

  Introduction

  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.

  The Vietnam War during the 1960s contributed to a growing revolutionary sensibility among disadvantaged minorities such as America’s black population, homosexuals, women and the politicised young, resulting in riots in Paris (les événements du mai 1968), violent demonstrations in London’s Grosvenor Square and on American university campuses, and leftist terrorist groups in Europe and the United States. Young designers, most of them coming from Britain’s art schools rather than the Chambre Syndicale school in Paris, took inspiration from street styles and modern art movements primarily pop art and graphic op art. In 1965 Yves Saint Laurent, who was to dominate the two decades, presented his Mondrian collection. He was also to pay homage to Poliakoff, Braque, Matisse, van Gogh, Renoir, Lichtenstein and Warhol.

  The early 1970s saw the downturn of the economic cycle, high unemployment, power cuts, strikes—and hippies. The highly politicised impetus of the 1960s gave way to a spiritual, often drug-fuelled altruism—turn on, tune in and drop out—and fashion became romantic, retro and eclectic, taking inspiration from other times and other places. In Paris Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Issey Miyake and Kenzo produced youthful collections culminating in the Big Look. In London Ossie Clark, Bill Gibb, Zandra Rhodes and Laura Ashley created romantic clothes just this side of fancy dress while Vivienne Westwood, equally historicist, was taking a more iconoclastic approach. The seeds of the Italian fashion industry were being laid at this time: Rosita and Tai Missoni, Giorgio Armani, Mariuccia Mandelli of Krizia and Walter Albini began to show in Milan while a small cadre of couturiers, including Valentino, survived beyond Rome of the dolce vita.

  In America a design dynasty of minimalists was developing in McCardell’s footsteps; Roy Halston, Geoffrey Beene and Bill Blass were followed by Calvin Klein. Ralph Lauren was getting his start with simple classics, and Donna Karan was doing her apprenticeship in designer sportswear at Anne Klein. A misty-eyed romanticism has never since quite disappeared from fashion; it is rarely done as beautifully as by John Galliano, but it was never again to be the dominant mode.

  23 NORMAN NORELL (1900–1972)

  When American designer Norman Norell died in 1972, shortly after a retrospective show of his life’s work had opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, The New York Times’s obituary headline ran, ‘Made 7th Avenue the rival of Paris.’ Such was the esteem in which Norell was held in America. Although the headline was stretching the truth in pure creative terms (the dominance of Paris continues to this day), it was certainly true that Norman Norell had turned the ready-to-wear industry of New York, focused on Seventh Avenue, into the heart of American fashion. He developed a wardrobe that suited the American lifestyle, with its emphasis on day-to-evening dressing and wearable, unpretentious clothes. For evening, he could also produce his own share of show-stoppers: sequin-covered sheath dresses were among his most celebrated creations.

  By designer standards, Norell’s life was uneventful, driven by the routines of his business. Most days, he worked from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. out of his studio on the tenth floor of 550 Seventh Avenue and lunched at Schraft’s on 43rd (always scrambled egg and crisp bacon). He researched his collection by leafing through fashion magazines in th
e New York Public Library. The design process began with the fabrics, usually ordered from Europe, and then his ideas were translated into rough sketches. Toiles were rarely used: Norell just got on with it in his no-nonsense style. He shunned the celebrity circuit, preferring to hang out with his friends and colleagues at Schraft’s. Norell was equally embarrassed by overambitious claims for the significance of fashion. ‘Arty talk about haute couture gives me a swift pain,’ he said in 1962. In an interview towards the end of his life, he commented: ‘I would rather see someone threadbare in something good than cheesy in the latest fashion.’

  He was born Norman David Levinson in Noblesville, Indiana, to Harry and Nettie Levinson. Harry, who ran a men’s clothing store, opened a men’s hat store in Indianapolis where everything was priced at $2. This was such a success that the family moved to Indianapolis when Norman was five. He was a thin little boy with a hot temper, he later recalled. At the age of nineteen, fashion design was his chosen subject of study, but there was no such course so he studied illustration in New York at Parsons, a school with which he retained a lifelong connection. He also chose to contract his name, ditching the workaday Levinson in favour of Norell. He explained: ‘Nor for Norman, L for Levinson, with another L added for looks.’

  Norell took his first steps as a designer in 1922 in the field of costume design, working at the Astoria Studio of Paramount Pictures. The stars for whom he designed included Gloria Swanson in Zaza and Rudolph Valentino in The Sainted Devil. The studio closed shortly afterwards and Norell worked on some Broadway musicals before joining Charles Armour, a dress manufacturer, who sent him to Europe for the first time. The defining moment of his career came in 1928, when he joined Hattie Carnegie. A fierce perfectionist, Carnegie was brilliant in her own way, although the process was unoriginal—visiting the couturiers in Paris, buying pieces, pulling them apart back in New York to understand how they were designed, and turning them into more affordable clothes for their American clients. This was the way the American fashion industry worked, founded on the creative insecurity of the American industry and the dominance, often laced with arrogance, of the Paris-based couturiers. The regular visits to Paris were an extraordinary training ground for Norell, an opportunity to understand the secrets of the great European couturiers and develop a profound technical knowledge of the process of creating great fashion. Over twelve years, he developed his skills and his eye, benefiting from the formidable tutelage of Carnegie. He put it simply: ‘I learned everything I knew from her.’