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THE RUDI GERNREICH BOOK |
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Early 1950s, wool coat. (photograph © Christa) As an art student at Los Angeles City College, Gernreich was close to Hollywood geographically; but though he worked in the publicity department at RKO Studios and once replace a friend who was a sketch artist for costume designer Edith Head, he did not become famous designing clothes for films. Hollywood was to become his home, but not his life. As the direct result of watching a performance by Martha Graham's modern dance company, Gernreich abandoned art and the movie studios in favor of dance and the theater. While studying with the choreographer Lester Horton, whom he described as "a kind of West Coast Martha Graham," he became less interested in the static details of clothes and more concerned with how they looked in motion. By the mid-forties, Gernreich was supplementing his dance career with a free-lance job designing fabrics for Hoffman California Fabrics. Realizing that he would never become another Lester Horton, he left the troupe in 1949, went to New York, and got a job with a coat and suit firm called George Carmel. Gernreich described the fashion climate ofthattime: "Everyone with a degree of talent-designer, retailer, editor-was motivated by a level of high taste and unquestioned loyalty to Paris. Christian Dior, Jacques Fath, Cristobal Balenciaga were gods. You could not deviate from their look. Once they'd decided on a dropped shoulder line, an American designer simply could not use a set-in sleeve. Once they'd established a hemline you couldn't depart from it by an inch. Seventh Avenue fed on their designs. I was bursting with original ideas, but they were always rejected because they did not fit into the French idiom. After about six months, I began to vomit every time I thought about the imperiousness of it all. I produced terrible versions of Dior. I was finally let go."
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