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Fashion Flashback: Rudi Gernreich

60s top model Peggy Moffitt

As Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week: Swim 2013 kicks off in Miami on Thursday; Fashion Reverie takes a look back at one of the fashion industry’s iconic swimwear designers, Rudi Gernreich. Born in Austria, Gernreich is best known in 1964 for creating the monokini (a topless one piece), the pubkini (a bikini with a clear window in the crotch area), and later the thong bikini, that is today quite commonplace.

A strong advocate of unisex clothing, Gernreich also distinguished himself for his use of plastic and vinyl in clothing. Closely identified with 60s top model Peggy Moffitt, Gernreich helped forward the movement in fashion in the 1960s for stretchy, flexible clothing that facilitated ease of movement, in a word giving the newly liberated woman of the 60s a more liberated wardrobe.

Rudi Gernreich died of lung cancer in 1985.

Look for Fashion Reverie‘s cover of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week: Swim 2013.

—Staff

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