Peggy Moffitt, the American model, who has died aged 84, joined forces with the designer Rudi Gernreich to scandalise the fashion world of the 1960s in baby-doll dresses, adult school uniforms and – most notoriously – a topless women’s bathing suit condemned by beach-area police forces from Santa Monica to St Tropez.
The image of Peggy Moffitt in Gernreich’s “monokini”, taken by her photographer husband William (Bill) Claxton, came to symbolise the sexual revolution and liberation of the era. It appeared in Women’s Wear Daily in 1964 and made headlines internationally. France issued a ban on the swimsuit; the Pope declared it immoral and the Soviet government denounced 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 around 3,000 topless swimsuits were ever produced; one, a gift from Gernreich himself, remained in Peggy Moffitt’s wardrobe, with the garment worker’s tag still on it. She kept it as a tribute to their friendship, which endured until Gernreich’s death from lung cancer in 1985.
Thereafter she became a guardian of his legacy, and a staunch defender against any perceived attempt to tarnish it through excessive prurience. She objected vociferously to plans by the Los Angeles Fashion Group to use a topless model as part of a Gernreich retrospective, declaring 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 say in how an image was put together and presented. To every shoot she brought her experience in ballet, theatre and mime, treating the photograph as a “piece of seamless white paper” on which to perform.
Runway shows were theatrical events, with basic dresses accessorised like stage costumes. While other models strutted in the approved manner, she would walk knock-kneed and pigeon-toed if she felt the outfit required it. “I’d look for the inner life of the dress, and when I did a whole collection, I’d figure out how to play each,” she recalled.
At times her relationship with Gernreich bordered on the symbiotic. He would devise a Pierrot-style collection and she would paint her face like a clown to match. As he was working on an Asian collection, she was in another part of the world, unaware of his plans, experimenting with Kabuki-like mask makeup. When he made a black skullcap with feathers, she bleached her eyebrows to give her face a deathly appearance. “Rudi and I turned each other on... we fed each other,” she recalled.
She continued to champion his clothes into later life, wearing them to most public appearances. They included oversized florals, windowpane checks and minidresses inset with vinyl stripes. Teamed with her lunar pallor, heavy-fringed eye make-up and her signature Vidal Sassoon asymmetric haircut – “Sassoon is to hair, what Picasso is to painting,” she once said – they made her one of the most recognisable figures in fashion.
She became disillusioned with the industry as a whole, however, declaring it “dead” save for “dream occasions” on the red carpet. Away from the party scene she was likely to be found in her garden, clad in jeans and a sweatshirt.
She was born Margaret Anne Moffitt in Los Angeles on May 14 1940. Her father, Jack Moffitt, was a screenwriter and film critic and she enjoyed 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 popular with the likes of Joan Collins and Audrey Hepburn. It was here that she first met Rudi Gernreich, already an established designer in his mid-thirties, and became an admirer of his clothes – though at the time he considered her too young to model for him.
Instead she went to New York for two years to study theatre and ballet at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Upon her return to Hollywood she landed a few small roles in films such as Girls Town (1959) and the Korean war movie Battle Flame (1959).
The first of the relationships that were to define her career began when the 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 collaborated with the couple on a series of fashion spreads.
Gernreich staged his defining photograph of Peggy Moffitt in the Claxton living room, with her standing on a bath mat. Initially, Life magazine refused to publish the picture, the editor reportedly telling Claxton that “naked breasts are allowed only if the woman is an aborigine”.
The trio reshot the image with Peggy Moffitt’s arms covering her breasts, but she was unhappy with the result, since it meant “going along with the whole prudish, tease-y thing like a Playboy bunny.” In fact Playboy had offered her $17,000 (more than her year’s salary) to print the topless image, but she dismissed the proposal as “unthinkable”.
In the ensuing years she was photographed by Richard Avedon wearing Rudi Gernreich’s “no-bra bra”, an alternative to the rigidly structured contraptions of the era. She accompanied the designer to England to collect the Sunday Times’ international fashion award and stayed for a year, dividing her time between London and Paris.
She had a bit part in Michelangelo Antonioni’s cult film Blow-Up and played a model in Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (both 1966). The photographer Barry Lategan, responsible for launching the career of Twiggy, shot the two of them together, Peggy Moffitt cradling the head of the younger model.
Upon her return to the US, Peggy Moffitt starred in a promotional film (shot by Claxton) called Basic Black (1967), for which Vidal Sassoon gave her the haircut she would keep for the rest of her life. Basic Black is now considered one of the first fashion videos ever made.
In December that year she featured with Gernreich and fellow model Leon Bing on the cover of Time magazine. The two women were both his champions and his most immediate critics, Gernreich telling one interviewer: “I work only with models I like and respect, and their reactions are extremely important to me.”
By the end of the decade, however, their fortunes were so closely intertwined that Peggy Moffitt had started 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 head for his “anti-statement” show in 1970, and in 1973 she withdrew from the fashion scene, moving back to LA for the birth of her son.
By the time of Gernreich’s death in 1985 he had virtually stopped designing, though the fashion world still recognised him as one of its most creative talents. In 1991 Peggy Moffitt and Bill Claxton published The Rudi Gernreich Book, which included a detailed photographic record of the various looks he had created for her. She held the legal rights to his designs and drew on them for inspiration in collaborations with the Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo’s brand Comme des Garçons, which included a wool “bikini” top.
In later life Peggy Moffitt lived in the Hollywood Hills, where she furnished the white walls with photographs from her modelling career as well as images shot by her husband Bill. The wardrobe was filled with Rudi Gernreich’s creations: jumpsuits, jackets, trousers and minidresses. Ten crates of clothes lay in storage.
Bill Claxton predeceased her in 2008. They had a son, Christopher.
Peggy Moffitt, born May 14 1940, died August 10 2024
