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THE RUDI GERNREICH BOOK |
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1973, plastic armor designed for a Max Factor promotion. Of all those speaking out against Gernreich's bald statement, only one, the Ponce College of Beauty in Pao Alto, California, took any action. The beauty college ran a half-page ad in the Palo Alto Times headlined "Help Stamp Out Rudi Gernreich." The trip to Japan, while not a part of the official Expo program, was financed by Max Factor. Because of the sponsorship, Gernreich expanded his original Life magazine projection to include makeup in a new role as a kind of body protector to shield man from the sun's rays and from the cold. The unisex clothes that were part of the presentation-pants, skirts, bikinis, jumpsuits-were all clothes from previous Gernreich collections. The boots had been made for him by Capezio in 1965. If the clothes looked new and bizarre, Gernreich said it was only because they were worn by two bald people. "This is true of all clothes-who puts them on makes them what they are." When Gernreich put the clothes for his spring 1971 collection on models carrying guns and wearing dog tags and combat boots, he fired another shot heard round the fashion world. The clothes themselves-previewed in October 1970, shortly after the student killings at Kent State-were basic, wearable knitted separates, but the rifles that the models carried took dead aim at the fashion industry itself. "Women are on the warpath," Gernreich told press and buyers attending the opening. "They're tired of being sex objects." Then, in a swipe at designers showing the clothes of Russian peasants and other heroines from history books, Gernreich went on, "You simply can't design clothes for Chekhov heroines in 1970! Fashion has got to be relevant to women today. There are no 'escape clothes' in this collection because there is no escape. To desire the past is to negate the present and the future as well." In keeping with the realism theme of the collection, all the clothes were priced under ninety dollars. And at a time when most major designers were showing the midi, Gernreich kept his hemlines well above the knees. By fall 1971 Gernreich extended his attack on what he called "the nostalgia cult." "I see the conditions today like this: anonymity, universality, unisex, nudity as fact and not as kick, and above all reality. By reality, I mean the use of real things: blue jeans, polo shirts, T-shirts, overalls. Status fashion is gone. What remains? Something I am obliged to call authenticity. Comfort is the rationale. Good looks deriving more from the person than from the clothes. The clothes are merely an instrument for the individual's own body-message. Prices must be kept down. No more conspicuous consumption. Today, 'expensive' is what 'cheap' used to be: the hallmark of an invaterate vulgarity. And there is at last an awareness of age, true age, that is the sign of a real enlightenment. At last a woman over twenty-five no longer feels a moral Obligation to look like a teenager. A division line between the ages is beginning to appear. This in itself opens countless opportunities." Perhaps the biggest shock Gernreich delivered in the seventies was that he had nothing more to say about the future. Fashion's leading futurist became the champion of "right now:' Amazingly, he was as alone in the present olthe early 1970s as he used to be when he was predicting the future in the 1960s. While yesterday-fever gripped most of the fashion world, Gernreich immunized himself and his followers with massive doses of what he liked to call uniforms-simple, functional knitted tops and bottoms that took on the personality of the men and women who wore them. "Do you see any Gernreich signature in these clothes?" he would ask buyers. If they said yes, his face fell. More than anything, he wanted his clothes of that time to be anonymous. Moffitt recalls a revealing incident of the era: "It was 1972, Bill and I had just moved back to Los Angeles. I was depressed with the fashion scene in New York and wanted to work more with Rudi. He and I were having lunch across the street from the Los Agneles County Museum of Art and were talking about how silly it was that Women's Wear Daily was raving so about Halston showing cardigan sweaters knotted around the shoulders. I said, 'If they think that's so great, why not just build a sweater right into the dress!' Rudi looked absolutely dumbfounded and said, 'How did you know? That's exactly what I'm doing: He then turned very serious and said: I don't want to work with you now. You inspire me, and I don't want to be inspired: Crestfallen, I went home and decided to start a family. Two months later, an effervescent Rudi bounded into my living room and asked me to model futuristic armor that he was going to do for a Max Factor promotion in July. When I reminded him that I would be eight months pregnant by then, he still thought that I could model. That was Rudi. Everything had changed, and now it was okay to be inspired. And while I did not model on that occasion, I continued to work with him after my son, Christopher, was born right up to his final collection in 1981." Convinced that "the creative part of fashion is gone,· Gernreich believed that the next breakthrough in clothes would be technological. "Once the sewing machine has been replaced or sophisticated, once a designer can spray-on clothes or transmigrate fabrics to the body, new things will happen:' he said in 1971. "The designer will become less artist, more technician. He'll be like an architect or engineer, with a sound background in chemistry. There won't be a need for sewing machine operators or cutters. Other machines will do this work. So a knowledge of machinery such as computers will therefore be essential. "When our technology made it possible to put men on the moon everything developed so quickly that people just couldn't face it. They took refuge in the past. The past became the security blanket of the present. Today, no one talks about the present. It's gone to most people. Instead, they're trying to adjust for the future. We used to think only in terms of the present. But today's present is the past and the future is just a fleeting moment in time." In Gernreich's view, the futuristic, lunar look of the sixties stopped short in the seventies and designers started reverting to the past because the moon was still a remote idea at the beginning of the sixties and it made sense to abstract it as a design theme. "Once it became a reality, once we saw the possibility of relating to it directly, it became frightening. To most of us, the moon still seems remote and unconnected with our daily problems. In a way, many are bored with the emptiness of the moon. 50m-'ike me-are even turned off by it. Getting a man to the moon was a phenomenal feat. I don't deny that. But the monies spent in accomplishing that feat might well have been spent solving earthly problems. I still feel that the legitimate thing is for right now-not the future, not the past. Maybe when the first space station is an actual fact, there will be a stronger sense of reality about the moon and it will become a realistic influence. Right now, there's no room to playact with the moon."
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