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THE RUDI GERNREICH BOOK |
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1954, white plastic dress. (photograph © Tommy Mitchell Estate) Although Gernreich owed his fashion fame to the sixties, he said in a 1972 interview that he really couldn't talk about that decade with pride. "What appalls me is my total involvement with something to unimportant. I find it hard to believe that I once developed collections around Ophelia, George Sand, clowns, cowboys, Kabuki dancers, nuns, 9angsters, Austrian cavalry officers, and Chinese operas. All these imaginary themes are unbearable to me today. "They were in 1971, too, when Ithought Iwas making a statement in favor of reality by accessorizing the clothes with guns and dog tags. New York publicist Eleanor Lambert set me straight.'Aren't you playacting, too, by dressing models like soldiers?' she asked. In a way, she was right." Moffitt sees Gernreich's latter-day recantations as totally unnecessary. "His Ophelia look was actually a pretty chiffon dress. His George Sand look was a very wearable pantsuit. All those ideas were pure design. You could still wear them without the fantasy." Gernreich began the sixties by ending his eight-year association with both Bass and Westwood Knitting Mills. In August 1960, just two months after he was informed that he had won a special Coty Award for swimwear design, he announced that the line he formerly designed for Bass would from then on be produced in Los Angeles under his own company, G. R. Designs, Inc., and that the knitwear would be manufactured by Harmon Knitwear, Inc., of Marinette, yvisconsin, owned by Harmon Juster, formerly of Westwood. Throughout 1960 and 1961, Gernreich was preparing the way for pop and op. While First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy was making the pillbox a national headdress and conducting White House tours in low-heeled shoes and a pared-down, two-piece dress with a high- necked overblouse and slender skirt, Gernreich was paring and baring even more. The January 1, 1961 issue of Vogue illustrated Gernreich's bathing suit/dress with side-cutouts, derived from a Gernreich swimsuit that was identical except for the skirt. He was also rearranging the rainbow with shocking combinations of pink and orange, blue and green, red and purple. He was rewriting fashion graphics by positioning checks with dots, stripes with diagonals. And he was shaking up the fabric world by bringing vinyl to the beach, Spanish rugs to the coatrack. Although Gernreich himself described the mini phenomenon as a gradual inch-up, he was baring knees as early as 1961. The June 2, 1961 issue of the New York Times reported, "Rudi Gernreich, California's most successful export since the orange, swings onto the flare bandwagon. Kneecaps show (on purpose), skirts swirl and ripple, clothes fall freely, touching the body only at the bosom." In June 1962, Gernreich won another design award, this one from Woolknit Associates for "his trailblazing silhouettes and fabric manipulation in knitted dresses." The "little-boy look" was one of his major themes that year, along with reversible sheaths, drop- shoulder sweaters, long-sleeved shirt shifts, shiny cellophane cloth evening suits, and allover feathery fringe dresses.
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