Word: gernreichs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ostrich Skirts & Ruffled Bibs. It is a sign of the times that Gernreich's fondness for exposing the body raised no heckles. Just four years ago, when Gernreich won his first Coty Award, Norman Norell returned his Hall of Fame plaque because "it no longer has any meaning." Norell has since reconsidered, now says: "I take it all back on the basis of the last two years he's a great designer." But Norell finds that when he tries to match Gernreich's pace and turn out younger clothes, they come out "too well-made." Puzzled by the direction that...
...made to send him to Paris to become an apprentice in a major couture house. But Hitler's armies were threatening Europe, and instead of going to Paris, Rudi's mother, who died two years ago, fled with her only child to America just before the Anschluss in 1938. Gernreich...
Crazy Sketches. By his own confession, Gernreich was never a great dancer. But being with the company gave him the chance to design costumes, the first real clothes that he had ever created. He also picked up a job designing fabrics. To dramatize them, he had them photographed draped around live models. People who saw the ads wrote to suggest that Gernreich try designing clothes, and so in 1949 he produced his first "experimental collection." A number of Los Angeles stores, including I. Magnin, wanted to order them, but, rues Rudi, "I had no way of producing them...
...Gernreich began learning the hard way, working for dress designers on the West Coast and in Manhattan. "I was expected to turn out collections based on Dior and Fath," he recalls, "but I was ready to burst out with new ideas." His chance to do so came in 1952, when he teamed up with Walter Bass, a fellow Viennese emigrant and the son of a tailor to royalty. Bass at the time was turning out classic women's suits-tight-fitting, full of darts, and with broad padded shoulders-in a small loft in Beverly Hills. "Rudi was doing these...
...Beverly Hills (the boutique chain has since grown to eight stores). "We had far-out things of our own," says Hanson, "so we had a ready-made clientele for Rudi's stuff, and we pushed him." The three-way association worked profitably for seven years. In 1959, Gernreich and Bass separated. Four years later, with Bonwit Teller anxious to carry Gernreich's clothes and Hanson determined to have him exclusively or not at all, they too broke. "Rudi is a supreme egotist," says Bass, who now runs gas stations. Echoes Hanson: "He's a publicity hound...