American model Peggy Moffitt, who has died aged 84, teamed up with designer Rudi Gernreich to shock the 1960s fashion world with baby doll dresses, adult school uniforms and - most infamously - a topless swimsuit for women that was frowned upon by police in beach areas from Santa Monica to St Tropez.
The image of Peggy Moffitt in Gernreich's "monokini," taken by her photographer husband William (Bill) Claxton, became a symbol of the era's sexual revolution and liberation. It appeared in Women's Wear Daily in 1964 and made international headlines. France banned the swimsuit; the Pope declared it immoral; and the Soviet government condemned it as a sign of "barbarism" and social "decay." Peggy Moffitt received both marriage proposals and threats.
Gernreich had conceived the monokini as a statement against American puritanism and the taboos surrounding female nudity. Only about 3,000 topless swimsuits were produced; one, a gift from Gernreich herself, remained in Peggy Moffitt's wardrobe, with the garment worker's tag still attached. She kept it as a tribute to their friendship, which lasted until Gernreich's death from lung cancer in 1985.
She subsequently became a guardian of his legacy and a staunch defender against any perceived attempt to tarnish it with excessive prurience. She vocally opposed the Los Angeles Fashion Group's plans to use a topless model as part of a Gernreich retrospective, calling the move "exploitative."
Throughout their 20-year partnership, she never saw herself as the designer's muse, but rather as his collaborator, with an equal voice in how an image was composed and presented. She brought her experience in ballet, theater, and mime to every shoot, treating the photograph as a "piece of seamless white paper" on which she could perform.
Fashion shows were theatrical events, with basic dresses worn as stage costumes. While other models walked in the prescribed manner, she would go knock-kneed and pigeon-toed if she felt the outfit required it. "I was looking for the inner life of the dress, and when I had a whole collection, I would figure out how to play each one of those dresses," she recalls.
At times, her relationship with Gernreich bordered on the symbiotic. He dreamed up a Pierrot-style collection and she painted her face into a clown to match it. While he was working on an Asian collection, she was in another part of the world, oblivious to his plans, experimenting with Kabuki-style mask makeup. When he created a black skullcap with feathers, she bleached her eyebrows to give her face a deadly look. "Rudi and I would turn each other on... we would feed each other," she recalled.
She continued to champion his clothes into her later life, wearing them for most of her public appearances. They included oversized florals, checks, and vinyl-striped minidresses. Combined with her moon-like pallor, heavily fringed eye makeup, and signature asymmetrical Vidal Sassoon haircut-"Sassoon is to her what Picasso is to painting," she once said-they made her one of the most recognizable figures in fashion.
However, she became disillusioned with the industry as a whole and declared it "dead" except for "dream occasions" on the red carpet. Outside of the party scene, she was most likely to be found in her garden, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt.
She was born Margaret Anne Moffitt on May 14, 1940, in Los Angeles. Her father, Jack Moffitt, was a screenwriter and film critic, and she had a comfortable upbringing, attending the exclusive Marlborough School for Girls.
As a teenager, she had an after-school job at Jax, an avant-garde boutique in Beverly Hills that was popular with the likes of Joan Collins and Audrey Hepburn. It was there that she first met Rudi Gernreich, already an established designer in his mid-30s, and became an admirer of his clothes-although at the time he considered her too young to model for him.
Instead, she went to New York for two years to study theater and ballet at the Neighborhood Playhouse. After returning to Hollywood, she landed a few small roles in films such as Girls Town (1959) and the Korean War film Battle Flame (1959).
The first of the relationships that would define her career began when jazz photographer Bill Claxton came to photograph her then-boyfriend for a magazine called Eve. The three spent the next 16 hours together, and it was only a few months before Bill proposed. Gernreich attended the wedding, and soon after, the designer worked with the couple on a series of fashion shoots.
Gernreich shot his defining photograph of Peggy Moffitt in Claxton's living room, with her standing on a bath mat. Life magazine initially refused to publish the photo, the editor reportedly telling Claxton that "naked breasts are allowed only if the woman is an aborigine."
The trio recreated the photo with Peggy Moffitt's arms over her breasts, but she was unhappy with the result because it meant she was "participating in the whole prudish, teasing thing of being a Playboy bunny." Playboy even offered her $17,000 (more than her annual salary) to print the topless photo, but she rejected the offer as "unthinkable."
In the years that followed, she was photographed by Richard Avedon wearing Rudi Gernreich's "no-bra bra", an alternative to the rigid constructions of the time. She accompanied the designer to England to accept the Sunday Times International Fashion Award and stayed there for a year, dividing her time between London and Paris.
She had a small role in Michelangelo Antonioni's cult film Blow-Up and played a model in Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (both 1966). Photographer Barry Lategan, responsible for launching Twiggy's career, photographed the two together, with Peggy Moffitt holding the younger model's head.
Upon her return to the United States, Peggy Moffitt starred in a promotional film (shot by Claxton) called Basic Black (1967), for which Vidal Sassoon gave her the hairstyle she would keep for the rest of her life. Basic Black is now considered one of the first fashion videos ever made.
That December, she appeared on the cover of Time magazine alongside Gernreich and fellow model Leon Bing. The two women were both his champions and his most direct critics. Gernreich told an interviewer, "I only work with models I like and respect, and their reactions are extremely important to me."
By the end of the decade, however, their fortunes had become so intertwined that Peggy Moffitt began to tire of the association, complaining, "I could put on a flour sack and people would think it was Gernreich." She refused to shave her body and attend his "anti-statement" show in 1970, and in 1973 she retired from the fashion world and moved back to L.A. for the birth of her son.
By the time of Gernreich's death in 1985, he had virtually retired from design, although the fashion world still recognized him as one of its most creative talents. In 1991, Peggy Moffitt and Bill Claxton published The Rudi Gernreich Book, a detailed photographic record of the various looks he created for her. She had the legal rights to his designs and drew inspiration from them for collaborations with Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo's Comme des Garçons brand, which included a wool "bikini" top.
Later in life, Peggy Moffitt lived in the Hollywood Hills, where she decorated the white walls with photos from her modeling career and those taken by her husband, Bill. The closet was filled with Rudi Gernreich's creations: jumpsuits, coats, pants, and minidresses. Ten crates of clothing were stored there.
Bill Claxton died in 2008. They had one son, Christopher.
Peggy Moffitt, born May 14, 1940, died August 10, 2024
