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Abstract
It is strangely difficult to speak of “materiality” in the face of “fashion.” Clothing designers often start with fabric (as a cloth’s pattern, weight, grain, and give all lend themselves to particular forms, cuts, and methods of manufacture). Likewise, consumers tend to prioritize size, fit (range of motion), weight, and texture. Yet critical attentions are quick to neglect fashion’s material consistencies in favor of its image—or “look.” Throughout his 30+year career, the (anti-)fashion designer Rudi Gernreich worked hard to reconcile this suspicious fracture—suggesting that a mere change of silhouette would never be enough, if the real aim was to change the social fabric itself. Gernreich understood clothing as a kind of social-technology that could (and had to) be retooled in the service of attaining a more equitable future—and he considered it his responsibility, as a fashion designer, to do just this.
Notes
1. Unlike Klein’s CK One, which was launched in 1994 and continues to be a successful product, the 1974 market was not ready for Gernreich’s unisex scent and the fragrance was a commercial flop, according to Gernreich’s friend and collaborator—the jewelry designer Layne Nielson (Nielson Citation2001: 56).
2. It is worth noting that while the garment’s designer is unknown, the fact that it was not Gernreich is confirmed by a note in the UCLA archive. The other two jumpsuits, on the other hand, were designed by Gernreich.
3. These garments served as the foundation of Gernreich’s own, signature look, and were repeatedly featured in his menswear lines—alongside an array of sweaters, swimsuits, and kaftan robes, which seldom made it to the mass market, or even into the mass consciousness in quite the same way that his other work did. As Richard K. Carty, a buyer for Rich’s department store in Atlanta, GA, explained in a letter addressed to Gernreich and dated December 13, 1977, regarding his menswear designs: “The fabric is sensual and suited for the designs however very limited in its customer appeal especially at the department store level. The department store customer is not sophisticated enough to understand the concept in general” (Rudi Gernreich Papers, Box 16, Folder 8). This sentiment is echoed in letters from other retailers who repeatedly confirm that they would be happy to carry Gernreich’s provocative womenswear, although his young men’s looks were “not mass market, [but rather] more specialty boutique” (‘Letter from a buyer at Foley’s Department store,‘1978, Rudi Gernreich Papers, Box 16, Folder 8).
Implied, is that making space for Gernreich’s looks in mainstream men’s departments would expose something that was meant to literally be kept “in the closet.” This consigned an important facet of Gernreich’s fashions to “specialty” catalogs such as Ah Men, which could afford to boldly celebrate the “concept” that these fashions pointed towards, during a time when the US gay and lesbian liberation movement was slowly working to gain speed. As one advertisement within the Ah Men catalog’s pages proclaims:
Ah Men and Rudi Gernreich present the newest evolution in swimwear design. These three fabulous swimwear items are secured by metal clip ends of dog leashes. The fabric is Antron® nylon spandex—sleek and skin hugging with masculine boldness of metal and sensuous body fit. We’ve fashioned these opposites into a design well ahead of its time. Now let yourself evolve (Rudi Gernreich Papers, Box 71, Folder 10).
4. In his essay on “Femininity,” published in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), Freud writes: “It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented—that of plaiting and weaving. If that is so, we should be tempted to guess the unconscious motive for the achievement. Nature herself would seem to have given the model which this achievement initiates by causing the growth at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals. The step that remained to be taken lay in making the threads adhere to one another, while on the body they stick into the skin and are only matted together. If you reject this idea as fantastic and regard my belief in the influence of lack of a penis on the configuration of femininity as an idée fixe, I am of course defenseless” (Freud Citation1965: 117).
5. In her essay, first published in October (1986), Linda Nochlin famously critiques how “notions of origination and originality ... inform the discipline of art history itself ... and [how it] has been constructed as the very source of artistic creation itself,” via an inspired, feminist reading of the way Gustave Courbet’s form of pornography wreaks havoc on the historiographic archive. Or, how desire upends the historian (and artist’s) quest for “truth,” or the lost origin(al), by catching their respective projects up in its infinite feedback loop (Nochlin Citation2007: 145).
6. Gernreich was famous for this often quoted mantra, “it is not a silhouette but an attitude that is important to change” (Felderer Citation2001: 15).
7. For more on the history of modern swimwear, see: Martin and Koda (Citation1990); Schmidt (Citation2012).
8. For more on the ways Cold War fears, tensions, hopes, and dreams effected fashion, see Pavitt (Citation2008).
9. The “youthquake” movement was famously so-called by the former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. For more, see Bolton (Citation2002).
10. A favorite of these ads, for Rolex, pictures a model wearing a knit, backless Gernreich dress accompanied by the tagline: “Take a Gernreich dress add a Rolex Watch, and you have a woman who knows what time it is” (December 1965, reproduced in Felderer Citation2001: 232).
11. Gernreich designed black rayon “non-uniforms” for Continental Airlines in 1963 that received high praise from air hostesses, such as Assistant Supervisor of Hostess Training, Mrs Lorna George, for its special, convertible abilities: “We can take off the hat and our wing emblems and have a smart black costume to wear anyplace” (Kansas City Times Citation1963: 15). Other commissions followed. For example, in the late 1970s the corporation Omniform engaged Gernreich to design uniforms for their airline customers, including Pacific Southwest Airlines and Western Air. These uniforms never went into full production, but prototypes of the Western Air uniforms are currently housed in the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising archives in Los Angeles. Details of the 1977–1978 negotiations between Gernreich and Omniform are located in the Rudi Gernreich Papers Box 6, Folder 5.
12. Examples include: Kirtland (Citation1964); TIME (Citation1967); Gernreich (Citation1970); Seder (Citation1979); Kamin (Citation1979). The public also followed these publications’ leads; scores of personal letters asking Gernreich to predict the future of fashion litter the Rudi Gernreich Papers.
13. It is worth noting that Gernreich himself did not originally plan to put the monokini into mass production. Always a conceptual and not a commercial work in his mind, only two suits were initially made—and both were produced for the sake of the design’s early photography. It was only after a meeting with Diana Vreeland that Gernreich agreed to manufacture the monokini, he recounts: “When [Vreeland] asked if I were going to make it for the public I told her no, that it was just a statement. ‘This is where you are making a mistake,’ she told me. ‘If there’s a picture of it, it’s an actuality. You must make it.’ When I returned to the hotel, I already had calls from Harmon [knitwear] telling me buyers were demanding to buy the suit. We agreed to go ahead with it” (Luther Citation1999: 20).
14. In a 1962 interview with Women’s Wear Daily, Gernreich flatly claimed that he had “gone so far with swimwear cutouts that [he] decided the body itself—including breasts—could become an integral part of a suit’s design.” After reading this provocative statement and the negative comments it provoked, Susanne Kirtland, a fashion writer at Look magazine, requested that Gernreich design such a suit for a feature the publication was doing on “futurist fashion”; hence the monokini’s now fabled provenance (Luther Citation1999: 19).
15. One infamous and heavily photographed example of such enforcement occurred in Chicago, when the 19-year-old Toni Lee Shelley was arrested for wearing the suit and modeling it for photographers (and police) on North Avenue Beach before being booked for indecent exposure (Alexander Citation1964: 62; Chicago Tribune Citation1964: 3). Another, less plein air incident occurred in San Francisco when Carol Doda, a go-go dancer at the San Francisco Condor Club was convinced to wear the monokini at work—prompting San Francisco police to make good on the mayor’s promise to arrest any woman who wore the suit for indecency, while simultaneously christening the Condor Club as the US’s first “topless bar” (Hsaio Citation2014).
16. Here, it is worth noting that the very next issue of LIFE magazine ran a cover image of the petite, Marilyn Monroe-esque actress Carroll Baker juxtaposed in her modern wardrobe against traditionally dressed members of Kenya’s Masai Tribe. Throughout the article, the unbridgeable differences between Barker, as “a modern woman,” and “the Masai people,” in toto, were repeatedly figured via their differences in dress and appearance (LIFE, July 17, Citation1964).
17. After the fervor surrounding the monokini, LIFE magazine had no option but to include an image of the suit and the young, bare white breasts it dared to display, the publication responded by running a full page image of the minimalist design as it hung on a hanger, held-up in the hands of a theatrically abhorred and blonde-bobbed, “modern gal.” To the right, LIFE ran a half-page, underwater shot of an anonymous model wearing the suit. This model, whom the article identifies as being from Paris (and not the US mind you), is shown encircled by three shirtless young men wearing a variety of masculine swimming trunks and one more modestly suited young woman pushed towards the right of the frame. All the bathers are cut-off at the neck, so as to maintain a modicum of their modesty and to avoid the exchange of sexualized gazes implied by their poses. In the pages that follow, an image of the monokini’s primary model—one of Gernreich’s most famous muses Peggy Moffitt, appears towards the end of an evolving timeline of Gernreich’s most famous suit designs. Moffitt’s wet hair is slicked back in the image, and she looks directly out at the viewer; she wears the suit with her arms strategically raised across her breasts and her fingers lightly grazing her slightly parted lips in a seductive gesture of simulated modesty that is not altogether unlike the pose of many a more bawdy and knowing Venus or Susannah from the long history of Western art.
While such a layout might seem outdated to contemporary audiences, a 2009 cover article from the women’s fashion and beauty publication Allure recently restaged the famous, full-frontal Claxton image, but likewise retreated from the image and the suit’s most quintessentially daring components—by having the image’s model, the pop singer Stacy Ferguson, aka “Fergie,” similarly raise her hands over her breasts, so as to conceal them (Hauser Citation2009: 137).
18. Here, Walter Benjamin’s famous comment on fashion from “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” bears repeating: “Fashion,” he writes, “has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago. It is the tiger’s leap into the past”—not, as popular logic might assume, “the future” (Benjamin Citation1955: 253).
19. For more on The Mattachine Society and Gernreich’s co-founder and ex-partner, Harry Hay, see Hay (Citation1997); Timmons (Citation1990); White (Citation2009). For a recent, theatrical exploration of Hay and Gernreich’s relationship and the founding of the Mattachine Society, see Maran (Citation2011).
20. This is certainly not to suggest that other notable fashion designers did not regularly use knits, but that Gernreich’s use of knits is key to understanding the materially grounded interventions that he was making into everyday social life. Many of Gernreich’s supermodern contemporaries shared this interest in more flexible and less-expensive knits, as did many previous designers, who were no doubt incredibly influential on Gernreich and his peers—most notably Coco Chanel, Claire McCardell, and Elsa Schiaparelli. For more on the historic use of knits in fashion, see Martin (Citation1998); Van Godtsenhoven, Haegeman, and Van Loon (Citation2011).
21. As is often noted by textile scholars and theorists of the text, alike, the word “text” is derived from the Latin word for textile (textus), which is, itself, a participle of the word that means to weave (texere). This etymological connection lays bare the ways that language and material culture reinforce one another’s forms. Essentially speaking, weaving is a system of differentiation that regulates chaotic jumbles of fibers into neatly predictable binary systems of warp and weft threads that can maintain relatively reliable shapes and textures across seemingly endless lengths. Language similarly maintains neatly predictable structures of meaning by organizing itself along dual vectors; at the level of the statement, for example, certain syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations are always set to rule. Much like an avant-garde author playing with language’s structures to try and radically alter the meaning of our everyday lives (in acknowledgment of how much our existence is mediated by the written and spoken word), I suggest that Gernreich’s clothes offer the opportunity to critically alter the textures and politics of the everyday by pushing “textility” (or sense making) beyond the basic, dualistic terms of the weave.
22. Surveys of Gernreich’s design drawings, left in the UCLA and FIDM Special Collections, show that Gernreich generally drew the body from head to toe, on long pieces of stationary emblazoned with his name in all caps at the top of the page and scaled to account for human proportions. Sometimes these drawings would be faceless, or the head would run into the text along the top—cutting into the figure’s eye—but seldom were they cut off at the neck.
23. Beyond passing references in the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, formative is Flügel (Citation1950).
24. “The Ancient Greeks derived [the Amazon’s] name from mazos, ‘breast,’ and a, ‘no,’ and explained that [the Amazons] removed their right breast to draw the bow more easily” (Guirand and Graves Citation1968: 122).
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Nicole Archer
Nicole Archer researches contemporary art and material culture, with an emphasis in modern textile and garment histories. Further interests include critical and psychoanalytic theory, corporeal feminism, and performance studies. Currently, Nicole is writing a manuscript entitled A Looming Possibility: Towards a Theory of the Textile, examines the ways that the textile works to produce and maintain the limits of “legitimate” versus “illegitimate” forms of state violence. Nicole currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she is also the Chair of the BA Department and Liberal Arts.