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THE RUDI GERNREICH BOOK |
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1971, quilt made for Knoll International. To Gernreich, it was also the year fashion died. Almost symbolically, Life magazine asked him to take it into the future. Editor Helen Blagden asked Gernreich to project what men and women would be wearing in 1980. Again, as in the case of Look magazine and the topless bathing suit, Gernreich said no, that it was impossible to predict a visual reality without creating a Buck Rogers caricature. Swayed by the fact that Ufe's special year-end double issue, "Into the Seventies," was also to include speculations on the consequences of moon flight by Norman Mailer and a Louis Harris poll on the social coalitions that would shape the future, Gernreich agreed to do what he considered a somewhat realistic projection of clothes for tomorrow. "If you go too far away from something plausible you lose just that-the plausibility of it. I really believe you can only see things in your own moment, that you're bound by your time. My ideas for Life were bound by the time, but I tried to take the limit off the time they were meant for by extending it to the year 2000." Those ideas -- shaved bodies and everyone stripped down to their barest essentials --were synopsized by Life (January 1, 1970, special double issue): "According to him IGernreichl, the nostalgic and 'circusy' look of today's clothes is a sinister sign that we are not facing up to the problems of contemporary life. The clothes of the future will have to be functional. Gernreich foresees a time just ahead when 'people will stop bothering about romance in their clothes: Tomorrow's woman will divest herself of her jewelry and cosmetics and dress exactly like tomorrow's man. Fashion will go out of fashion. The 'utility principle' will allow us, says Gernreich, to take our minds off how we look and concentrate on really important matters. Clothing will not be identified as either male or female. So women will wear pants and men will wear skirts interchangeably. And since there won't be any squeamishness about nudity, see-through clothes will only be see-through for reasons of comfort. Weather permitting, both sexes will go about bare-chested, though women will wear simple protective pasties. The aesthetics of fashion are going to involve the body itself. We will train the body to grow beautifully rather than cover it to produce beauty." For the elderly, Gernrelch predicted caftan-like coverups. "The present cult of eternal youth is not honest and certainly not attractive. In an era when the body will become the convention of fashion, the old will adopt a uniform of their own. If a body can , no longer be accentuated, it should be abstracted. The young won't wear prints but the elderly will because bold prints detract. The elderly will have a cult of their own and the embarrassment of old age will fade away."
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