Peggy Moffitt, Sixties actor and model, 1937-2024

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Of all the decades of the 20th century the 1960s is probably the most picked over by historians. It was crammed with social and cultural change; in many countries it marked a break with the past, a kicking over of conformist traces and a cementing of modernity. Peggy Moffitt, who has died aged 86, was one of the most fashionable faces of the middle years of that packed decade.

Margaret “Peggy” Moffitt was born in Los Angeles in 1937; her father was a screenwriter and film reviewer. After finishing school she moved to New York, where she studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, whose alumni include Steve McQueen, Jeff Goldblum and Carol Channing. From 1955 to 1960 she had a handful of mostly walk-on parts in minor films and television shows. She was persuaded to model by the photographer William Claxton, who she met and married in 1959.

In the early 1960s she began developing the image that propelled her to the centre of the zeitgeist. Her trademark look was a helmet-shaped bob, its fringe cut on the slant for a while by Vidal Sassoon, but usually a symmetrical black curtain arching just above deeply outlined eyes, emphasised further by pale foundation. The effect was sometimes reminiscent of a Japanese theatrical mask, sometimes — when she drew exaggerated lashes on her cheek — of a porcelain doll. It was a style she would maintain for more than 60 years.

Her career really took off when she met the Austrian-born fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, for whom she became an inspiration and a sounding board, matching his avant-garde creations with dramatic make up and face jewellery and channelling her acting skills. “He would give me a dress, I would respond to it as a performance,” she said. “I would say ‘who is that dress?’”

His maverick mid-60s collections, which won him multiple awards, had her interpreting anything from elaborate brocade suits inspired by Austrian cavalry officers’ uniforms to nothing more than adhesive black plastic triangles stuck on her body and limbs.

Worldwide fame and some notoriety came in 1964 when Claxton photographed her wearing Gernreich’s topless swimsuit. Gernreich said the monokini, designed as a concept piece rather than for commercial production, expressed women’s freedom to wear what they wanted. The questions raised by feminist writers about whether the sexual revolution of the Sixties was liberating women or opening them to new forms of exploitation were yet to reach the mainstream. Moffitt always sidestepped such issues. “I’m not political,” she told an interviewer in 2013. “They said ‘Have you burnt your bra?’ I said ‘I don’t have a bra’.”

In 1965 she moved to Europe, spending 12 months working in Paris and London. Her style — like that of fellow model Twiggy — epitomised the mod-inspired swinging milieu of the English capital. She returned to the screen briefly — actor turned model turned actor playing model — in Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 thriller set against the fizzing London fashion scene.

In his book Ready Steady Go; Swinging London and the invention of cool, which features a close up of Moffitt on its cover, Shawn Levy says that by 1967 — when Blow Up was released in the UK— London’s effervescence was already waning, the sharp lines and geometric stylings the film showcased giving way to a look that was more “hairy and druggy, enamoured of strange fabrics and eccentricities acquired on foreign travels or in granny’s attic”.

Moffitt returned to the US, first to New York and then to Los Angeles, where she remained for the rest of her life. She continued to act as Gernreich’s muse, appearing with him on the cover of Time magazine for a feature that described him as “the most way-out, far ahead designer in the US”. 

In 1970 he embarked on a project that was too way-out even for Moffitt. She turned down his request to embody his forecast of fashion trends as they might look in the year 2000, involving male and female models with shaved heads and bodies, posing naked and then in matching miniskirts. But she returned to collaborate with him throughout the 1970s — while raising her son Christopher, born in 1973. When Gernreich was dying in hospital in 1985 she and Claxton rushed to his bedside. In 1991 the couple edited a book celebrating the designer’s work.

Claxton died in 2008 and Moffitt continued to promote both his photography and Gernreich’s designs. She claimed to dislike being photographed but remained proud of the work that she had made, the clothes and photos that she animated, and of her part in shaping the visual image of a pivotal era.