Word: rudi
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...Fashion Designer Rudi Gernreich seems to have a bag of answers [Dec. 1]. What's his prescription for those of us who want to swing, but have borne five or ten children, are plagued with varicose veins, "wash the gray away," are too old for the Pepsi generation and yet too young for the Golden Agers? MARY Q. AASTERUD Milwaukee...
...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, I had no knowledge about manufacturing...
...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 crazy sketches, but nobody knew what to do with them," says Bass. But with Gernreich designing and Bass handling the business end, the pair produced a line of loose-cut, tightly belted dresses in ordinary ginghams and rayon tweeds. The operation was tiny, but, says Rudi, "for the first...
Enter Jack Hanson, who had just opened Jax in 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...
...also tests out new swimsuit fabrics. As a former dancer and an outdoors-loving Californian, he believes wholeheartedly in the natural body. He has carried his beliefs into practice. Today, Editor of French Vogue Françoise de Langlade de La Renta claims: "No one has freed the body like Rudi Gernreich, and I doubt that anyone so overflows with ideas." One of his most liberating designs was a simple knit tank suit with no inner construction. It came at a time when women were bathing in suits so full of stays and gussets that they practically stood up by themselves...