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THE RUDI GERNREICH BOOK |
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1956, hostess dress with trompe l'oeil beach jackets. (photograph © Christa) At the Coty Award presentation, when the winning designers traditionally showed clothes from the collection that earned them the award as well as capsules from their current lines, Gernreich again caused a flap with a white lingerie satin pantsuit he called his Marlene Dietrich suit. When Moffitt wore it during dress rehearsal, members of the Coty jury told her she looked like a Lesbian and asked Gernreich not to show it. He reluctantly acceded to their demands. The next year a similar suit in white slipper satin was shown by that year's Coty Award-winning designer and no one raised an eyebrow. As Moffitt points out, "The beehive hairdo and high heels obviously made the idea acceptable one year later." The brouhaha that literally became an international incident happened in 1964 with the topless bathing suit. On September 12, 1962, Gernreich predicted to Women's Wear Daily's Los Angeles reporter Sylvia Sheppard that "bosoms will be uncovered within five years" and later repeated the forecast in the December 24, 1962 issue of Sports Illustrated. Here is Gernreich's account of the events that followed: "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. "At this time, breasts were growing in dimension, if not physically, cosmetically, and above all, sociologically. They had almost become jokes. Every girl I knew was offended by the dirty-little-boy attitude of the American male vs. the American bosom. To me, the really beautiful breasts belonged to the really young bodies. Baring these breasts seemed logical in a period of freer attitudes, freer minds, the emancipation of women.
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