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.
Moffitt makes claims for the importance of Gernreich as the 20th century designer. At the start of 1999's The Rudi Gernreich Book, which she created with Claxton (who has been her husband since 1959) she comes right out with it: "In the 20th century there have been a handful of geniuses whose innovations have changed the course of their art for all time: In painting it was Picasso. In music it was Stravinsky. In film it was Eisenstein. In theater it was Stanislavsky. In dance it was Balanchine. In jazz it was Parker. And in fashion design it was Rudi Gernreich." Got that? Not Dior. Not Chanel. Much less Armani. Gernreich. And she's not being glib. She lists the accomplishments she ascribes to him, among them: The first see-through clothes; the first cut-outs; the first "body" clothes based on leotards and tights; the first mixed patterns; the first use of vinyl and plastic; the first bathing suits without inner construction; the first thong bathing suits; the first "no-bra" bra; the first unisex looks; the first knitted "tube" dress; the first clashing color blocks; the first head- to-toe "total looks"; the first overall designer commitment to comfort; the first designer to revolt against couture, status clothes and high-cost fashion; the first designer jeans. Even if you were to attribute only half of these innovations to Gernreich, the designer's contributions still go way beyond the topless bathing suit that has obscured them.
Moffitt's willing service to the memory and legacy of Gernreich is the present parallel to her willing service as his muse in their mutual heyday. In the '60s and '70s her ambition and ego were, interestingly, not so overwhelming as to need a spotlight dedicated directly on her. To her, Gernreich was joy. She adored his vision from the first time she spotted one of his dresses in Beverly Hills's coolest shop at the time, Jax. And she adored him from the moment he walked into Jax after she'd gotten a job there. She preferred to do anything she could do with him over anything she couldn't.
Part of what compelled such loyalty was her awe at his genius. "Rudi invented modern fashion," she says today. "All fashion changed with him, Everything had to be thrown out. If you've been given the freedom, you're not going to go back to Dust Bowl dresses or things you can't run in when somebody's trying to mug you." And you're not going to let yourself be a duped fashionista, are you? The stronger bond between Moffitt and Gernreich, though, was the emotional and aesthetic twinship that made them happy kids in the same sandbox. Technically, Moffitt was a gifted model, and one well suited to Gernreich's designs. More important, she was an unusual product of Los Angeles seemingly destined to partner up in an unusual collaboration with one of the city's most unusual immigrants.
The daughter of a successful screenwriter, Moffitt spent six years in uniform at the upscale, private Malborough School, a place she describes as "interested in all of the things I was not interested in." Uniform or not, she was a natural avant-gardiste. She fell in love with ballet, which she was too tall for, and harbored dreams of acting, which took time to dispel. After going to New York to attend the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre for two years (in the same class as Robert Duvall, Suzanne Pleshette and Sidney Pollack), she came back to Los Angeles. It was 1957. "The Golden Age of Hollywood was over," says Moffitt with long-lingering dismay. "Sandra Dee was the thing. Everybody was in a submarine." And the submarine was not yet yellow. "I went on go-sees and did some TV and movies where if you blink you miss me," she says. Her odd, long-limbed, dark exoticism doomed her to the margins. And, in turn, Hollywood, where she'd grown up, lacked glamour for her. "I liked the fashion world better," she says. "As an aspiring actress, I saw Hollywood as sweating fat men with cigars stuck in their mouths." She gravitated to modeling, struggled to be accepted and had developed the skill of a pro precisely at the time Gernreich, with whom she crossed paths, was gearing up for his definitive decade.
But there was another figure in the Moffitt movie, one who would give it full romantic dimension while adding to its artistic allure. That was William Claxton. As early as 1950, Claxton was already a successful commercial photographer famous for his jazz photography. He entered Moffitt's life in the fateful way things tend to happen for her. She'd been fighting with her actor boyfriend, Tom Pittman, and she happened to look out the window and see a tall man emerge from a racing-green Jaguar just below. Claxton had come to see a girl his friend Tom had recommended for a shoot, but there was "instant like" between the photographer and Moffitt. Moffitt, her boyfriend and her future husband spent the whole day on into the night in each other's company, evolved into a friendly trio, then gradually narrowed down to a destined two. They married, and within the next few years became two out of three in a new and more interesting trio.
Claxton had worked with Gernreich. Moffitt had grown up enough to become Gernreich's model and develop a fearless rapport with him. "We all collaborated together," says Moffitt. "Rudi was the dresser for me. Bill took the pictures. We cut the crap out of the process." The collaboration flourished throughout the sixties, no matter that Claxton and Moffitt lived much of that time in Europe and New York and Rudi stayed an Angeleno. "He hated the fashion rat race in New York," says Moffitt. Each of the three collaborators seems to have had a healthy drive to do what they wanted to do and avoid what they disliked. Claxton shot portraits of Hollywood people, particularly Steve McQueen, whose portraits made for an entire book. Moffitt had another run-in with cinema and again ran the other way: You can see her in Michelangelo Antonioni's classic Blowup, but not due to much effort on her part.
"I was not someone who concentrated on making the scene," says Moffitt. "I've been to thousands of jazz concerts but I've never been to a single rock 'n roll concert." That's a little surprising to anyone who remembers the famous '60s Time cover on which Moffitt appeared, along with model Leon Bing, flanking Gernreich, whom the cover story described as "The most way-out, far-ahead designer in the U.S." Way-out and far-ahead as Gernreich may have been, Moffitt contends that the magic circle she formed with Rudi Gernreich and William Claxton did not define itself as part of the '60s, but rather defined a timeless aesthetic.
"I look at fashion magazines now," says Moffitt, "and go, 'There it is, there it is, there...' Everybody has knocked Rudi off." He didn't really mind being knocked off, according to Moffitt, but after so many years and a number of retrospectives, one just ending at the Phoenix Art Museum, Gernreich has still not, from any fair perspective, been elevated above the level The New York Times established in '61 by calling him "California's most successful export since the orange."
"I can't do more for him than hope that he's acknowledged," says Moffitt of the partnership she and Claxton have created with Comme des Garcons' designer Rei Kawakubo and Milanese fashion maven Carla Sozzani. As to whether the topless bathing suit will end up part of the "tribute" to add even more tedium to future cocktail parties, Moffitt is beyond trying to direct that part of her personal movie, "as long as I don't have to wear it.
Keeping the Dream Alive
One may be hard-pressed to find a more doggedly determined group of artisans than those who restore classic L.A. homes. One such person is TV-producer-cum-designer Eric Allen, who purchased the Rudi Gernreich estate (featured on the following pages) in 2000 and, along with his partner, designer Jonathan Fousek, spent the next three years restoring it--with no outside help. "We actually took classes at the Home Depot on how to set marble tile," Allen says. "At the end, we could finally say, 'We did it all ourselves,' and then people would go, 'That's great! Which contractor did you hire?' We were like, no, we really did do it all ourselves."
Although restorative touches abound, the house retains much of its "original groovy '60s feel," says Allen, from the bedrooms to the ethereal dining room to the newly restored 50-foot-long bar, which looks out at a dramatic view of Los Angeles "Friends come by for drinks sometimes, and their jaws drop when they catch a view of the skyline," Allen says. "At night, it's like looking out at the Emerald City."
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Daniel Davis