Peggy Moffitt: The Moffitt Movie

Mod muse Peggy Moffitt's L.A. story gelled when she teamed with designer Rudi Gernreich and photographer William Claxton revolutionizing fashion with one snap of the camera's shutter.

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Maybe Sirhan Sirhan had this problem off in whatever prison they keep him, but it's hard to think of anyone else who faces this dilemma. The person who said this, though, is once-famous model Peggy Moffitt, and the sixtieth of a second she's referring to is the one that occurred in 1964 when her husband, fashion and portrait photographer William Claxton, snapped a timeless shot of her in designer Rudi Gernreich's soon-to-be-infamous topless bathing suit.

There simply isn't any other fashion moment in history that's had an international shockwave effect to rival the one set off by Gernreich's clingy suit with straps that extended northward so neatly between very naked breasts. Shockwaves were becoming the order of the day--JFK had been assassinated a little more than six months before, and The Beatles had even more recently arrived in America. The country was ripe for coming unglued. But not even the naturally provocative Gernreich had prepared anyone for a gesture of such apparently wanton nonchalance. Gernreich was a rising designer with a reputation for modern, unstructured swimsuits and a Coty Award to his name when this happened; Moffitt was his not-yet-iconic model/friend/muse/ collaborator; Claxton, a well-known photographer, was his friend and the husband of their shared muse. If this sounds straight from a movie by Robert Altman, that's probably because it might as well be. It's a quintessentially Los Angeles story, and much of it actually took place in L.A., where creative people (and many uncreative people) live movie-shaped lives.

Claxton's shot-heard-about-'round-the-world almost didn't get seen at all. The New York fashion press dropped their jaws at the photograph of Gernreich's creation and backed instantly away, even though it had been a Look magazine editor who goaded Gernreich into designing the swimsuit to begin with. Only Women's Wear Daily worked up the nerve to publish a front view. The reaction was swift, and it went on and on and on. Buyers demanded the suit, and major stores ordered it--only, in many cases, to withdraw it from sale under protest. In Moscow, the newspaper Izvestia gleefully railed against it as a symbol of Western moral decay. Holland, Denmark and Greece banned it. The mayor of Saint-Tropez reportedly claimed himself ready to patrol the beaches with helicopters to spot any jeunes filles who might dare to wear the obscene garment. The Pope banned it. And thus Rudi Gernreich became a global household name decades before the world got global.

Moffitt, whose public identity was and has remained inextricable from the name Gernreich, is, almost 40 years after the fact, probably never more than a few seconds away from some reference to toplessness whenever she's at a party of anything but her best friends. And now the model, who is 65, is ensuring that no matter how long a life she enjoys she will never be free of the burden of talking about the topless bathing suit. She has joined forces with Comme des Garcons to pay homage to Gernreich, who died of lung cancer in 1985, with a series of "mini-collections" that may include a re-creation of his most famous piece. Whether because she saw there was no escaping history, or because her fierce belief in Gernreich's genius includes the notion that his originality and influence are both currently underrated, she's now willing to talk all the more about her sixtieth of a second. As for the motivation of Comme des Garcons in resurrecting Gernreich, it doesn't take a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows. The "sixties," and particularly the heady, happy, sleek, futuristic, mod "sixties," are everywhere, from runways to Target to L.A.'s premier vintage shop, Decades. Even if Gernreich's best-known vocabulary of part-classic, part-space-age lines and fearless color combinations weren't particularly au courant, the designer was such a restless idea man that his relevance has unstoppable legs. You can wear vintage Gernreich now and look 21st-century fashion-forward.

Gernreich was a far more surprising man than the hype he courted was ever going to suggest. He'd come to L.A. in 1938 as a teenager with his mother in flight from the Nazi takeover of Austria at the same time so many great European artists-- everyone from Schoenberg to Brecht--had done the same thing. And like those already famous personalities, he remained essentially European and kept a critical distance on the world immediately around him. That he was never subsumed into any aspect of the film business may be an indication of the strength of his ego, which sought its own stage once it had dabbled in dance and theater. He was friendly with many different Hollywood people--a very young Barbra Streisand modeled his designs, and groovy stars all wore them--but he was friendly with every kind of artist and with lots of other people who interested him. His lover of 30 years was Oreste Pucciani, a UCLA French professor and Sartre disciple.

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