Word: rudy
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Most of the New Guard of Seventh Avenue designers, however, swing right along with Rudi. "I have never enjoyed designing more," exclaims Chester Weinberg, 37, who has been on his own for barely a year and a half long enough to pick up the patronage of such Manhattan pacesetters as Best-Dressed Amanda Burden, Pop Art Promoter Ethel Scull and Anne Ford Uzielli. Says Weinberg: "This youth movement is just right for me." Although he experimented with mid-calf midis for his evening clothes, for day-time he kept his dresses short, made them pretty, with lots of ruffles...
...father, a hosiery executive, died when Rudi was eight. He detested school because of its "rigid militaristic atmosphere." His sanctuary was the dress shop run by one of his aunts. He became so enthralled with the world of dress design that plans were 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...
...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...