Remembering Fashion Icon Peggy Moffitt (1940-2024)

It would be hard to think of Peggy Moffitt without remembering her work with Rudi Gernreich. None of us would have that association without the work of Moffitt’s husband, the photographer William Claxton, who worked in tandem with his wife and the award winning designer (and provocateur of American fashion) on some of the most iconic, and sometimes controversial, editorial images produced in fashion during the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1964, Women’s Wear Daily published a William Claxton photograph of Moffitt wearing Gernreich’s monokini, a one piece swimsuit which exposed a woman’s breasts. It was never intended to be put into production, though it was, apparently it began a political or cultural statement, but one that immediately became a global sensation as well as a controversy. The Pope issued a ban on the monokini, Russian leadership claimed it was a sign of the decline of the United States, and more than one woman was arrested for wearing the suit in public.

The only person who ever photographed Moffitt in the monokini was her husband, Claxton, and she never wore it publicly. Still, the photograph became an iconic part of American Fashion almost from the moment of inception. In 1967 the trio produced Basic Black: William Claxton w/Peggy Moffitt, which is commonly accepted as the first fashion video.

Margaret Anne Moffitt was born in Los Angeles on May 14, 1940 and attended the Marlborough School for Girls in Hancock Park. She studied ballet, which would later become part of her trademark modeling style. In the 1950s, in New York City, she studied acting at the famed Neighborhood Playhouse, where she learned alongside fellow classmates Robert Duvall and Suzanne Pleshette under instructors Martha Graham and Sydney Pollack. A role in a musical comedy and a short stint at Paramount Pictures followed.

Moffitt met Gernreich in 1954, still a high school student, her son, Christopher Claxton told Women’s Wear Daily that “they hit it off and had a lot in common. They both approached art and design in a similar way and had a big appreciation for dance and humor in design.”

Claxton and Moffitt met in Los Angeles in 1958. At the time, he was employed by a record label as an art director. The couple married in New York in 1959, and it was Claxton who inspired Moffitt to try her hand at professional modeling. Their son Christopher was born in 1973.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Moffitt modeled in all the major fashion hubs, from New York to London and Paris, and appeared in what have become known as cult fashion films, like Blow-Up in 1962 and Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? In 1966.

Modeling was only part of Moffitt’s celebrated career in fashion. When Gernreich died in 1985, Moffitt held the trademark to his name. She wore his designs her entire life, reportedly owning some 300 pieces, some made in colorways that were never commercially produced. In 1991 Taschen published The Rudi Gernreich Book, which featured many iconic images of Moffitt, by Claxton, wearing designs by Gernreich. In 2003 she worked with Comme des Garçons, reinterpreting some of Gernreich’s designs and collaborating on a collection of tee shirts. In 2016 she created a leisurewear brand with designer Evelina Galli.

There have been multiple exhibitions at prestigious museums and galleries which focused their lenses upon Moffitt’s work with Gernreich, like Fearless Fashion: Rudi Gernreich which was held at Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center in 2019. In 2012, Cameron Silver created an exhibition, The Total Look: the Creative Collaboration Between Rudi Gernreich, Peggy Moffitt and William Claxton. It was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Pacific Design Center Satellite in West Hollywood, which was focused on the spirit friendship which existed between the three parties.

I spoke with Silver, a longtime friend of Moffitt, about his experiences working with her on the exhibition, as well as her impact on American and global fashion. “When I curated The Total Look,” Silver told me, “I remember how many people of Peggy’s generation who saw the exhibition reached out to me and explained what an important figure she was in their life because she broke the mold of conventional beauty.”

“Not a Teutonic blond,” Silver said of her well-known hairstyle, “Peggy’s black Vidal Sassoon cut, expressive movement, and confidence in Rudi Gernreich’s avant garde fashion was liberating to those who were outside typical definitions of attractiveness. I was always struck by that since she was not a Grace Kelly clone like most models.”

Peggy Moffitt died in Beverly Hills on August 10, 2024 following a long illness, news which was confirmed to Women’s Wear Daily by her son, Christopher Claxton.