Perhaps most famous for his 1964 topless bathing suit, Austrian born Rudi Gernreich was a dancer in his youth and this love of movement informed his design aesthetic that freed women’s bodies. His roots in the Bauhaus movement also led him to favor function over form and these forces combined to create a designer whose clothes were revolutionary in the 1950s using tights and leotards instead of boning and underpinning. His model, muse and close friend Peggy Moffit called him, “a fashion prophet who came up with all of today’s trends yesterday.” Based on the Maillot swimsuit of the 1920s Gernreich added elastic to hug the female form in swimsuits and later adapted it into the tube dress. An early forerunner of the emancipation of women, he invented the “no bra” bra with a soft nylon cup that followed rather than dictated a woman’s natural shape. In the 1960s he introduced the concept of unisex clothes, offering floor length kaftans and white bell-bottomed pants for fashion-forward men and women. Gernreich experimented constantly with the possibilities of various materials using cutouts, vinyl, and plastic, and mixing patterns such as checks with dots – always with the goal to expose and highlight, not hide, the human form.