2024 Karmiole Fellow Lecture: Fashioning Liberation: Rudi Gernreich and the Counterculture

Join UCLA Library for a presentation from writer, historian, podcast host and 2024 Karmiole Fellow Ben Miller. This event will feature materials from Library Special Collections' fashion and textile collections.

Fashion designer, gay rights pioneer, dancer, and refugee: Rudi Gernreich lived a fascinating life that is a metonym for the career of the counterculture: a window into the promises, the pitfalls, the successes and the failures of liberation.

Gernreich was born in the Jewish bourgeoisie of Red Vienna and raised in the heady progressivism of German life-reform movements that promised to free the body and spirit from the crushing forces of getting and spending. Gernreich fled Fascist Austria with his mother and settled in Los Angeles, where he joined an influential modern dance company before (debatably) co-founding the gay rights movement in the United States. He went on to a prominent career in the revolutionary space age of fashion, threatened his own career with political protest in the late 1960s and spent his final years delivering home-cooked organic soup in his white Bentley to private clients in Beverly Hills.

Gernreich’s fashion career changed how people dressed and how they thought about their bodies: as well as the topless monokini bathing suit, his creations included the first transparent bra, the first see-through chiffon blouse, some of the first vinyl and plastic clothes and gender-neutral clothing. But Gernreich was not a pure provocateur, nor someone who abandoned youthful convictions in search of fame and fortune. His life helps us understand how and where and for whom liberation succeeded, where and for whom it failed, and how it was commercialized, institutionalized and sold for profit.

This talk is open to the public with no RSVP required. Unable to attend in person? Join the event via Zoom webinar(opens in a new tab).

Ben Miller is a writer and historian living in Berlin. With Huw Lemmey, he hosts Bad Gays, a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history, which has been downloaded more than two and a half million times; a book based on the show and passionately arguing for a more complex and political queer public history, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, was published by Verso in 2022. His next book, a biography of the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich that doubles as a history of how the politics of liberation traveled from the European interwar avant-garde to 1960s California, is currently under contract with W. W. Norton. His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled "In Search of Lost Time: Primitivism and the Self-Invention of the White Gay Man," received a summa cum laude from the Freie Universität Berlin.