Displaying items by tag: topless swimsuit

Much has been written about the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, when America seemed to be moving past the puritanical 50s. The introduction of the birth control pill was perhaps the biggest event in that battle, but almost as important was the introduction of a little thing called the “topless bathing suit” in 1964.

The suit was designed by Austrian-American designer Rudi Gernreich. Look Magazine was planning a feature on futuristic ideas and asked Rudi to submit what he thought the future held for women’s bathing suits. With the bikini already firmly established on the beaches of America, Gernreich knew he had to go farther, so he designed what he first called the monokini. He was playing off the “bi” part of bikini although that design had been named after an atoll in the Pacific Ocean with the “bi” having nothing to do with “two.” It didn’t matter. The press ignored Rudi’s name and promptly dubbed it what it was: the topless swimsuit.

Gernreich could find no professional model willing to wear it for the Look photoshoot. So, Rudi recruited a personal friend and model Peggy Moffitt to wear it. She agreed, but only if the photos were taken by her husband in a private setting. A shot of Peggy, bare-breasted, appeared first in Women’s Wear Daily.

Look didn’t want bare breasts in what was a family magazine, so they used a rear view of the suit modeled by someone else. When Life Magazine wanted to run a photo of it, Peggy posed again, this time with her arms more discreetly placed across her chest. (That's the photo you see here at the top of the post.)

Gernreich had intended the suit to be a prediction of things to come and initially had not put his monokini into production. But orders for the suit began to pour in. Bowing to demand, Gernreich eventually produced 3,000 units of his knitted suit in several different colors, selling for $24. Just who these suits were sold to and where they were worn is something of a mystery. A few surviving photos show that maybe some made their appearance at private pool parties.

Only two attempts to wear the suit on a public beach are recorded. One was by exotic dancer Carol Doda in San Francisco, mainly to publicize her appearance at the area’s first “topless nightclub.” The second was worn by model Toni Lee Shelley on a Chicago beach. She was arrested.

Exactly how the suits were sold is also a bit murky. One store in Dallas tried displaying the suit on a mannequin, but public protests caused them to pull it from the window. In Milwaukee, a local women’s dress shop had one in their front window, but the cops made them turn the mannequin around, so only the back could be seen.

Gernreich hoped the suit would remove the sexual connotation attributed to women’s breasts. In that, he failed completely. But in advancing the sexual revolution, adding the word “topless” to our sexual lexicon, and encouraging more revealing clothing for women (the thong-bottom swimsuit would arrive 25 years later), he was a smashing success!