Rudi Gernreich, "a great example of how far we haven't come"

Rudi Gernreich was born into a non-religious Jewish middle-class family in Vienna in 1922. When he was eight, his father committed suicide, Genreich was mainly raised by his mother and aunt who ran a fashion salon where he learned "the grammar of feminine adornment". In 1938, anti-semitism forced him and his mother  to flee the country. They left for the United States where they settled in Los Angeles. His mother baked pastries, Gernreich sold them door to door. Then he washed cadavers for autopsy. Years later, he recalled: "I grew up overnight. I do smile sometimes when people tell me my clothes are so body-conscious I must have studied anatomy. You bet I studied anatomy."

Gernreich studied art for a while, joined a dance company as a performer while designing the company's costumes. There he also met Harry Hay and became one of the cofounders the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights organisation. Genreich did not come out publicly. 

With his topless monokini, designed in 1964, Gernreich "dared to question the taboo of nudity, or more specifically, female nudity" causing outrage which ranged from the Pope forbidding Catholics to wear it to the French Riviera prohibiting it but also Denmark, Greece and the Netherlands banning it. 

The story of the topless bathing suit begins with Adolf Hitler. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Hitler banned public nudity with an executive order. The Post-Freudian Viennese had taken to exercising in the nude, regarding it as healthy. Among those who fled the Nazi regime was widowed Jewish mother Elizabeth Gernreich and her 16-year-old son Rudi. They came to America, where Rudi launched an L.A. career as dancer, fashion designer, and gay activist. He was a founder of the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights organization. 

Throughout his life, Gernreich retained the free, Viennese attitude to nudity. This was reflected above all in his swimsuits. In a 1962 issue of Women's Wear Daily, Gernreich declared: "Bosoms will be uncovered within five years." Thereafter journalists kept pressing him for specifics. "It was my prediction," Gernreich recalled. "For the sake of history, I didn't want [Emilio] Pucci to do it first." (via)

His fashion was more about statement than marketability, It was about questioning the way women's bodies were regulated by the fashion industry, about unisex clothing and the boundaries of gender entrenched within fashion. His no-bra bra was "a protest against the aesthetic ideal of breasts padded into uniformity". 

Fashion, as we know it, is dead. In the new environment of the future, people will accept their bodies. Clothes will be utilitarian, organic, and minimal. It will free us to think of more important things.

Rudi Gernreich, 1971

Fashion does come up from the streets now. Young people are saying ‘We are people, not men and women.’ There’s no sexual confusion. It’s a social change. Rudi Gernreich, 1967

Ahead of his time, Genreich is, in fact, "a great example of  how far we haven't come." (all sources via and via and via and via)

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photograph (by William Claxton, 1964, Vanity Fair) via