THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 3Fr om top: Rudi
Gernreich, center,
with models in
1967. Model Rose
McWilliams, wearing
Gernreich’s monokini
in 19 64. Photographs
from top by Ben
Martin/Getty Images;
Bettmann Archive/
Getty Images
1977, Gernreich had reluctantly specified to an Arizona Star
reporter what he felt to be his greatest achievement: “I’ve been
able to contribute to freedom—not just of the body, but of the
spirit.” It took, though, the rest of his life to find the courage to
publicly declare where he stood as a man.
Longtime Gernreich model Léon Bing, who’d once posed
with Gernreich and fellow model Peggy Moffitt on the cover of
Time, told me that on Aug. 8, 1972 — the day he turned 50 —
Gernreich was uncharacteristically grumpy. Normally he was a
jovial man, with an impish sense of humor, but on that red-letter
day he was clearly bummed. When asked why, he mournfully
explained to Bing: “I can never again be an enfant terrible.”
True, he was getting older, and it would not be long before he
seemed not quite so revolutionary as he once had been. In 2022,
though, his sleek knits, riotous prints and body-embracing
jumpsuits are showing up in museum exhibits and online. (For
the past decade, a German entrepreneur named Matthias Kind
has been promoting a revival of some of Gernreich’s more
provocative creations by way of his site, rudigernreich.com.) And
the current availability of genuinely see-through bikini tops and
bottoms from companies like Beach Revolution Swimwear —
whose slogan is “Wear BR Swimwear or nothing at all” —
suggests that today’s fashionistas are catching up with
Gernreich’s radical concepts.
One day someone might even popularize his final creation.
Photographed by Helmut Newton one month before Gernreich’s
death, it was a tiny scrap of black fabric framing the model’s
pubic hair, shaped and dyed a poison green. A glimpse of the
future? Maybe so.Beverly Gray is a biographer and film historian in Southern California.