THE FIRST MONIKINI
G'day folks,
Amazing how fashions change.
When we think of the
monokini today, we picture those fiddly one-piece swimsuits that give you
awkward tan lines, popularised by the Kardashian and Hilton sisters. But the
first monokini was in fact originally a topless swimsuit that exposed the
female breasts, conceived in 1964 by avant-garde designer Rudi Gernreich, who
predicted (rather accurately) that “bosom will be uncovered within five years.”
While the design initially
had a harder time catching on in the United States (the first American model to
pose in the swimsuit, Peggy Moffitt, received death threats), the monokini
appears to have found itself more at home unsurprisingly in Paris, at the
legendary Piscine Molitor, where the first bikini was revealed to the world
nearly twenty years earlier in 1946.
The suit’s creator, Rudi
Gernreich, was an Austrian-born American fashion designer and early gay
activist who had learned about female fashion in his aunt’s dress shop in
Vienna. Rudi and his mother fled Austria after its annexation to Nazi Germany,
where Hitler had banned nudity, among many other acts. Austrian
citizens were advocates of exercising nude, a rejection of the
over-civilized world. Gernreich was very much against sexualization of the
human body and the notion that the body was essentially shameful, which was
reflected prominently in his designs.
Widely censored in the
media and renounced from all corners including Vatican officials and the
U.S Republicans, who tried to blame the suit on the Democrats’ stance on
moral issues. Even the Soviet Union chimed in, calling it barbarianism. Never
intended by the designer to be a commercial success, over 3000 monokinis
at $24 were sold in New York in the summer of 1964 at leading store like Henri
Bendel. The monokini greatly influenced the sexual revolution by
emphasizing a woman’s personal freedom of dress, even when her attire was
provocative and exposed more skin than had been the norm during the more
conservative 1950s.
The Peggy Moffitt photograph became a celebrated
image of the extremism of 1960s designs and raised the feminist issue of
whether both genders should be allowed equal exposure above the waist. In its
December 1962 issue, Sports
Illustrated declared that Rudi Gernreich had
“turned the dancer’s leotard into a swimsuit that frees the body. In the
process, he has ripped out the boning and wiring that made American swimsuits
seagoing corsets.”
It had all started the year
prior in 1963 when the editor of Look magazine,
Susanne Kirtland had asked Gernreich to make the suit to accompany a
trend story along futuristic lines. When a photo shoot for his topless swimsuit
was arranged on Montego Bay in the Bahamas, all five models for the session
outright refused to wear the design. The photographer finally persuaded a local
prostitute to model it. Only the back view of the monokini ended up being
published in Look in
1964, but it was Kirtland who pursuaded Gernreich to produce the design
commercially and make it available to the public.
In June of 1964, the PR
manager of the Condor Nightclub in San Francisco gave one of the
waitresses the monokini designed by Gernreich to wear for her act. At that
moment, Carol Doda, a former prune picker became the first
modern topless dancer in the United States. Within a few days, women
in clubs all the Broadway St. clubs of San Francisco were sporting the monokini
in many of the clubs lining San Francisco’s Broadway St, effectively
reinventing the burlesque era of the early 20th century and ushering
in the era of the topless bar.
Carol Doda was later
arrested in 1965 for indecency which sparked a protest outside the police
department calling for her release. The monokini had made the former prune
picker a symbol of sexual freedom.
In the same year he released
the monokini, Rudy also invented what we essentially know today as a seamless
soft-cup elastic bra. The “No-Bra”, as he named it, was made of
sheer-stretch fabric without underwires or lining of any kind. In 1972, he
then designed the “No-Bra Bra”, which was made of sheer, stretchy fabric that
could be pulled on over the head. His minimalist designed revolutionized bra
design, changing the trend from a sculpted, bullet-shaped bosom to a more
natural shape. (Thanks for that Rudy!)
Clancy's comment: Some photographers have tough assignments, eh? Oh, did you happen to notice the cameras they were using?
I'm ...
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