Peggy Moffitt, the model who, in the 1960s, became a symbol of the decade’s freedom and experimentation with her signature look and her collaborations with the avant-garde designer Rudi Gernreich, has died at 87. The news was confirmed by Moffitt’s son, Christopher Claxton, to WWD on Tuesday morning.
Born Margaret Ann Moffitt on May 14, 1940, in Los Angeles, California, Moffitt originally wanted to be a dancer. “I studied ballet,” she explained in a 2016 interview. “I have always been interested in movement more than the old-fashioned thing of having to fit yourself into somebody’s preconceived form rather than have your body be the form.” In the 1950s, she moved to New York to pursue the two-year acting program at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where her teachers included Martha Graham, Sanford Meisner, and Sydney Pollack. She returned to Los Angeles but was disappointed to only land bit parts in movies—or, as she described it in a 1993 interview with the Los Angeles Times, “the 10th in a line of squaws standing by a tepee”.
In 1959, she married William Claxton, a photographer known for his portraits of famous jazz musicians and Hollywood celebrities. While Moffitt had always had an interest in fashion—she worked at the famous Jax boutique in Los Angeles while in high school—she was introduced to the world of fashion photography through her husband. “It had a little chic,” she recalled.
When Moffitt was 22, she met Gernreich, who hired her to be a model for his junior line. “He was using big-boned country-club types, and thought I was too young for his clothes,” she explained, but the two became friends and Moffitt became an integral part of Gernreich’s creative process. “He once said to me, ‘You inspire me when I don’t want to be inspired,’” she told WWD in 2016. Moffitt’s husband soon joined their creative cocoon, and in 1964 they shook the world with a simple black and white photograph of Gernreich’s famous “monokini,” a maillot that exposed the wearer’s breasts. At the time, when Gernreich first showed her the design, the model reportedly asked, “Who are you going to get to model that?” (To which he responded, “You!”)
It took Moffitt two months to understand Gernreich’s vision of freedom and femininity, and when she eventually posed for the photo, it was under a set of conditions of her own making; she would only do it with her husband behind the lens, and she would get to decide where the picture ran. “Not Playboy. Not Esquire,” Moffitt explained in a 2001 interview. “I didn’t want to be exploited.” When the photo was eventually published, it created a shift in society, going so far as to be denounced by the Vatican. But one person who immediately embraced it was Diana Vreeland, who requested to see the swimsuit on Moffitt, in person. At the Vogue offices, the model wore a kimono and performed a kind of dance in front of the editor.
“I showed Mrs Vreeland the front of the suit, the side of the suit, the back of the suit, and Mrs. Vreeland looked at me and said, ‘Maaaarvelous!’” she recalled in an interview with The Cut. Although Moffitt understood the importance of the garment, the image, and the moment, it was not representative of her own real-life interests. “I am a puritanical descendent of the Mayflower. I carried that goddamned Plymouth Rock on my back,” she once joked. Though she did own a monokini, gifted to her by Gernreich, it languished in her closet throughout the decades with the tags still on.
By this point, Moffitt had developed her signature beauty look. First, there was her jet-black asymmetrical bowl-cut hairstyle, dubbed “the Five Point,” and cut by Vidal Sassoon himself. Then, her distinctive eye makeup, which was inspired by Japanese kabuki theater, and included heavy eyelashes and a thick black cat-eye style that surrounded the whole eye, then filled in with white around the inner-eye. Her striking look made her a modeling super star, and brought her back to the world of movies; she appeared as a version of herself in the iconic Swinging Sixties films Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and William Klein’s Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo?; in one famous scene from the latter, she is surrounded by six other models all made up to look just like her. And in 1968, she was the title character in a children’s book written by her friend William Pen Du Bois, titled Pretty Pretty Peggy Moffitt. The book, about a young girl who is always looking at her reflection, was part of a children’s series Du Bois created around the seven deadly sins (this one was pride). Naturally, the little Peggy Moffitt in the book is wearing all clothes designed by Gernreich.
Moffitt, Claxton, and Gernreich again broke new ground in 1968 with the production of what is thought to be the first-ever fashion film. Titled Basic Black, it captured Moffitt’s unique approach to modeling while wearing the designer’s latest collection. She explained her process as “responding to a dress as a performance.” “I would say, ‘Who is that dress? Is that dress a Vampira kind of lady or is that a Raggedy Ann doll?’, and it would give me something to do rather than to think about how uncomfortable I am pretending to be pretty.”
Upon Gernreich’s death in 1985, Moffitt retained the rights to his designs, and in 1991, she published The Rudi Gernreich Book, which collected the many memorable images that were a product of their rare creative spark. She also worked with Comme des Garçons’s Rei Kawakubo in 2003 to produce a capsule collection of Gernreich’s designs that was sold at 10 Corso Como and Dover Street Market. Moffitt’s only foray into design came in 2016, when she launched her own line of workout wear.
Although her image became emblematic of 1960s beauty, Moffitt wore it for the rest of her life. “I know it’s funny for me to tell you that what my look is is the natural look, but it is for me because it is of my nature,” she once said to Jeanne Beker in an interview. “I would adore looking like Candy Bergen, but even if I had Candy Bergen’s visage, I know that I would still wind up looking like this, because my soul is Peggy Moffitt—and Peggy Moffitt likes to tinker around, and doodle on her face, and do graphic things, and make strong statements that she believes in.”
