Joe McConnell
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Of all the decades of the 20th century, the 1960s are probably the most scrutinized by historians. They were full of social and cultural change; in many countries they marked a break with the past, a breaking away of conformist traces, and a consolidation of modernity. Peggy Moffitt, who has died at the age of 86, was one of the most fashionable faces of the middle years of that dense decade.
Margaret “Peggy” Moffitt was born in Los Angeles in 1937; her father was a screenwriter and film critic. AVsceker finishing school she moved to New York, where she studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, whose former students include Steve McQueen, Jeff Goldblum and Carol Channing. From 1955 to 1960 she had a handful of mostly walk-on parts in minor films and television programs. She was persuaded to become a model by photographer William Claxton, whom she met and married in 1959.
In the early 1960s, she began to develop the image that catapulted her to the center of the zeitgeist. Her signature look was a helmet-shaped bob, with bangs that were cut slanted for a while by Vidal Sassoon, but usually a symmetrical black curtain that arched just above her deeply lined eyes, further emphasized by pale foundation. The effect sometimes resembled a Japanese theater mask, sometimes—when she drew exaggerated lashes on her cheek—a porcelain doll. It was a style she would maintain for more than 60 years.
Her career really took off when she met Austrian-born designer Rudi Gernreich, for whom she became an inspiration and sounding board, pairing her avant-garde designs with dramatic makeup and face jewelry and channeling her acting skills. “He would give me a dress, and I would see it as a performance,” she said. “I would ask myself, ‘Who is that dress?'”
Her nonconformist collections of the mid-1960s, which won her numerous awards, saw her interpret everything from elaborate brocade dresses inspired by the uniforms of Austrian cavalry officers to simple black plastic adhesive triangles stuck to her body and limbs.
Worldwide fame and a measure of notoriety came in 1964, when Claxton photographed her wearing Gernreich’s topless swimsuit. Gernreich said the monokini, designed as a conceptual piece rather than for commercial production, expressed women’s freedom to wear what they wanted. Questions raised by feminist writers about whether the 1960s sexual revolution was liberating women or opening them up to new forms of exploitation had yet to reach the mainstream. Moffitt always avoided such questions. “I’m not political,” she told an interviewer in 2013. “They asked me, ‘Did you burn your bra?’ I said, ‘I don’t have a bra.’”
In 1965 she moved to Europe, spending 12 months working in Paris and London. Her style, like that of fellow model Twiggy, embodied the swinging, mod-inspired scene of the English capital. She returned to the screen briefly, as an actress turned model, then an actress playing a model, in blow up, Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 thriller set in London’s effervescent fashion scene.
In his book Ready Steady Go; Swinging London and the invention of coolwhich features a close-up of Moffitt on the cover, Shawn Levy states that in 1967, when to blow up was released in the UK: the effervescence of London was already waning, the sharp lines and geometric styles shown by the film were giving way to a more “hairy and druggy look, in love with strange fabrics and eccentricities acquired on trips abroad or in grandma’s attic”.
Moffitt returned to the United States, first to New York and then to Los Angeles, where she remained for the rest of her life. She continued to be Gernreich’s muse, appearing with him on the cover of Time magazine for an article that described him as “America’s most eccentric and avant-garde designer.”
In 1970, she embarked on a project that was too outlandish even for Moffitt. She refused his request to embody his prediction of fashion trends as they might look in the year 2000, involving male and female models with shaved heads and bodies, posing nude and then in matching miniskirts. But she collaborated with him again throughout the 1970s, while she raised her son Christopher, born in 1973. When Gernreich lay dying in the hospital in 1985, she and Claxton rushed to his bedside. In 1991, the couple edited a book celebrating the designer’s work.
Claxton died in 2008, and Moffitt continued to promote both her photography and Gernreich’s designs. She claimed not to enjoy being photographed, but remained proud of the work she had done, the clothes and photographs she animated, and her role in shaping the visual image of a seminal era.
