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.
