Dear Shaded Viewers,
It’s rare to find a model whose image isn’t about constant change to keep working; once Peggy found her “look” she stuck to it even when working with Stephen Meisel for Vogue Italia decades after her main career.
As a student I was obsessed with her and remember at a show for the Royal College of Art fashion department I think 1965, she had made a tiny, short film for a student and appeared in person, I was maybe eighteen. I relentlessly copied her in my drawings as a fashion student selecting her makeup, her poses, and her hair as the ideal for my designs (I was training, back in those days to be a designer.) I tore images of her from magazines, viewed her as an icon of style and went to see both the movies Blow Up and Qui Etes Vous Polly Magoo in 1966 because she made appearances in them.
At a time when heavy makeup was a major part of fashion Peggy had amazing painted eyes with massive false eyelashes, the palest of foundations and the lacquered bowl five-point hair cut invented by Vidal Sassoon. She wasn’t a cover girl or mainstay of glossies but a cult model and her work with Rudi Gernreich the brilliant ex dancer turned fashion designer was phenomenal. I think it was Queen magazine in London who photographed them working together where his brush strokes on a wall matched the stripes on her clothes.
Peggy Moffitt was born in 1940 in Los Angeles where she died eighty-four years later, she was married in 1960 to the great photographer William Claxton who died in 2003. They have a son Christopher born in 1973.
Peggy started life as an actress which clearly showed in her modelling work, she performed in front of the camera. After some years she moved into modelling and met Rudi Gernreich in the 1962, modelling for him in New York. So, over the next few seasons her signature appearance and her collaboration with Gernreich grew in strength. Although in 1965/66 Peggy was in Europe her whole essence was of nowhere and no time, and when in 1994 she appeared shot by Stephen Meisel in Vogue Italia she looked totally unique in the group model shot, for the 30th Anniversary issue. She remained simply Peggy Moffitt, a fashion one off, unique, and special.
Peggy Moffitt wore the monokini, or topless swimsuit designed by Gernreich and in spite of showing it to Diana Vreeland it was back then not a Vogue piece.WWD first featured it in 1964, and obviously it caused uproar and was a topic of conversation way beyond fashion circles. It had first been discussed back in 1962 and Peggy Moffitt talked about going braless as a model. So, it was all part of the sharp changes of the decade. I have remained faithful to my passion for her throughout my professional life.
On Wednesday the 7th of October 1998 at the Galleria Carla Sozzani, I met Peggy Moffitt at the opening of exhibition of William Claxton pictures Omaggio a Rudi Gernreich. I was slightly shaking, my palms were a bit damp but thirty years late I met Peggy Moffitt, and she was exactly as I’d hoped, divine and charming and sweet, as my words tumbled out and I think I blushed, but I’d held the hand of Peggy Moffitt, I’d realised a dream.
Gernreich collaborated with Moffitt and her husband, photographer William Claxton. The three became “a dynamic and inseparable trio.” explained Moffitt in The Rudi Gernreich Book. Her final words in this book I think show her as a person so beautifully.
“Without Rudi I would have been a gifted and innovative model. Without me he would have been an avant-garde designer of genius. It was fun, it was invigorating, it was a true collaboration, and yes, it was love.”
