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THE RUDI GERNREICH BOOK |
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1976, Rizzoli asked a group of prominent designers to create fantasy clothes for an exhibition. Rudi dressed a couple in bicycle parts. (photograph © William Claxton) Gernreich's private office was a world of browns-personal, warm browns that contrasted with the more public schematics of the black- nd-white showroom. A Charles Eames chair, leather pig, tortoise-shell telephone, mushroom lamp-all these sepia tones made the room feel like an old Sunday rotogravure section redesigned with modern graphics. The room's only concession to the past was a Mexican chest inlaid with bone. It was brown too, and inside, behind its closed doors, were Gernreich's many awards. Behind the Moroccan wall that surrounded the home he shared with Oreste Pucciani in Hollywood's Laurel Canyon, Rudi was both open and closed about his relationship with his lover: he readily invited straight guests to dinner parties cohosted by Oreste but was reluctant to discuss his sexuality-at least with me. I "knew" he was gay, and I think he knew I knew, but neither of us ever brought up the subject. Rudi started each new season by taking the thumbnail sketches he'd been preparing whenever and wherever the idea struck and worked them into detailed drawings, complete with fabric samples and color swatches. Those quick, crude sketches might have been generated by an actual incident witnessed by Gernreich, as was the case in his 1970 swim clothes that came about as a direct result of "watching kids jump into a swimming pool with their clothes on and emerge in a dripping wet cling of sex appeal that made bikinis look almost boring."
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