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With his spring collection now done, Gernreich is looking ahead to the next. He sees fashion as a great, marvelous and on-going game: "Style today is a kind of flaunting of one's personality. The important thing is to get a total feeling for what's new and then make it part of yourself." As fashion grows steadily freer and less inhibited, he hopes that whole costumes will become inexpensive enough to be worn briefly, then thrown away on a whim. Nudity? "I think a great deal more of it is going to be around yes, including the topless." Skirts, he believes, are finished and will soon be replaced by tunics combined with tights into two-piece garments. But most of all what Gernreich insists upon is that the dress should never again dominate the woman. "Clothes are just not that important," says he. "They're not status symbols any longer. They're for fun."
*The others: Norman Norell, Ben Zuckerman, James Galanos, Pauline Trigere, and posthumously, Claire McCardell (TIME cover, May 2, 1955).