The man who invented the thong

These days you see it everywhere: it sticks out from hipsters as if it were 2008 , glitters under transparent beach dresses or exposes tanned buttocks on the beach .

That's right, we're talking about the thong, which is currently celebrating a comeback thanks to the fashion revival from the 2000s, when it was omnipresent. What many people don't know about it is that its invention was a political statement, and its creator was a gay man.

July 1974: the last summer of nude bathing in Los Angeles

But first things first. In 1974, Los Angeles' popular Venice Beach transformed into a sea of exposed buttocks for one summer.

"Everyone was naked," recalled a lifeguard in the US newspaper "LA Times." No one knows exactly how it came about. What is certain is that the nudist hype fell into the time of the hippies , who were probably happy that nudity was not yet explicitly forbidden.

But the nude summer dream was short-lived: First the press came, then the police. After nude bathing made headlines, Los Angeles simply banned it altogether.

What does this have to do with the thong? Rudi Gernreich, an Austrian designer living in LA, rebelled against the ban in his own way. In response to the censorship of the naked body, Gernreich created a tiny piece of fabric for all genders that covered only the bare essentials.

The designer wasn't trying to sexualize bodies . Quite the opposite: "The liberation of the body will cure society of its sexual complex," he reportedly said. It wasn't the first time he broke taboos with fashion.

Career in LA

Gernreich was born on August 8, 1922, in Vienna. He found a new home in Los Angeles in 1938, having been forced to flee the Nazis with his mother at the age of 16. His father had recently committed suicide. While his mother sold baked goods door-to-door, young Rudi also found a job to supplement the family finances: he washed corpses in preparation for autopsies.

"I have to laugh when people tell me that my clothes are so body-conscious, as if I had studied anatomy. And how I had studied anatomy," Gernreich said in an essay in Moffitt and Claxton's "The Rudi Gernreich Book."

In fact, Gernreich later studied art rather than anatomy, working as a costume designer and dancer. His designs consistently reflect his fascination with bodies of all genders.

"Male or female, everyone will dress the same"

At a time when homosexuality was still criminalized in the United States, Gernreich was already living openly as a gay man. He co-founded the Mattachine Society, one of the first LGBTQIA+ rights organizations in the United States.

Gernreich already lived what we now call queer . For him, the future of fashion was unisex: "Clothing will no longer be identified as male or female," he predicted back in the 1970s. "Winter or summer, male or female, everyone will dress the same." For the 1970 Osaka Expo, he designed an entire unisex collection; his models—both male and female—were without makeup, shaved, and depilated.

No more corsets and hourglass silhouette: Free the nipple

Gernreich's fashion also broke with the beauty ideals of the 1950s, which forced women's bodies into tight corsets. By 1964, he had become widely known when he presented his infamous topless swimsuit: the monokini . The swimsuit, considered scandalous then as it is today, completely exposed the breasts except for two strips of fabric—a kind of thong for the breasts.

Gernreich believed that women should be allowed to show their nipples just like men—and, above all, they should be able to decide for themselves. "I don't like telling women what to wear," he said in a 1966 interview with the AFP news agency.

How would he view today, when Instagram censors female nipples and public nudity is still a problem in many places? Gernreich was certainly a man ahead of his time.