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THE RUDI GERNREICH BOOK |
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1966, vinyl designs for Montgomery Ward. (author's collection) During this time, Montgomery Ward asked Gernreich to make a personal appearance at one of their Chicago stores. It was to be a lesson in humility. "It was a completely conventional appearance of a designer in a store, arranged so people could come up and ask questions- you know, harmless. They put a little poster in one of the pillars on the floor, with a picture of me in the background. They had wads of photographs for me to autograph. And they had the area cordoned off with velvet ropes. It was announced that I'd be there between lunch and 2 P.M. At noon, there were droves of people coming up the elevator. I thought I was about to be mobbed. Well, no one came up to me. Not one single person came to see me. And I'm standing there, and finally a couple of ladies came up, and I thought, well, it's going to start now. And they said, 'Where's the ladies' room?' That was all." In his own collections of that period, Gernreich introduced knitted swimsuits with vinyl-appliqued elastic stockings held by vinyl garters. He designed the first chiffon T-shirt dress. He created helmets that extended over the face, coats with nose-level necklines, swimsuits that looked like turtleneck ski sweaters. And he feather-printed matte jersey in shifts with matching stockings and feather headdresses. He was rewarded with a second Coty Award in 1966. By September 1966, Gernreich was bringing his strong sense of graphics directly to the body, effecting the first modern tattoos by pasting triangles, squares, circles, and rectangles all over the arms, legs, and torsos of his bikini- clad models. The adhesive ornaments were packaged in plastic bags and accompanied his swimsuits for Harmon Knitwear. Moffitt recalls the evolution of those first body graphics: "When we were doing the Indian collection of 1965, I wanted to wear a caste mark, but I couldn't put lipstick on my forehead because I'd be wearing modern, non-Indian, swimwear one change later, so I cut a circle out of a fuchsia-colored matchbook and put it on with eyelash glue. The decals that were to appear later came from that matchbook idea. The next collection I made little geometric tears out of aluminum foil. Later, when I came back from Europe, Rudi had taken that idea to its ultimate limit by giving me a red bikini bottom to wear and pasting black vinyl triangles over the rest of my body."
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