Not only were literature and film affected by the sexual movement, fashion was also. Just two years after Helen Gurley Brown asked women to bare everything they had in the name of sexual liberation, a fashion designer named Rudi Gernreich asked them to bare even more with the introduction of the “monokini”. His controversial design was a standard one-piece bathing suit on the bottom with two delicate straps rising between the breasts. The suit was his personal contribution to the cause of physical sexual freedom. Only a few thousand sold but it was enough to cause a stir in America. Newspapers were crazy for hits like the “topless swimsuit”. So much so that San Francisco Chronicle debuted a picture of a woman in the bathing suit on the front …show more content…
David Rosenberg was a failing nightclub promoter living in San Francisco. One day he decided to add some spice to his go-go club by making the dancers wear Gernreich’s topless suit. Rosenberg told his idea to the owner of the Condor Club and the owner quickly agreed. On June 22, 1964, the topless bar was born. The Condor Club became an over night sensation. Men were paying a large sum to visit the club. Go-go dancing also made its debute and quickly found its way to the east coast. Go-go dancers are dancers who are employed to entertain crowds at nightclubs or other venues where music is played. Go-go dancing originated in the early 1960s, by some accounts when women at the Peppermint Lounge in New York City began to get up on tables and dance the twist.24 Some claim that go-go dancing originated at, and was named for, the very popular L.A. rock club, Whiskey a Go-Go, which opened in January 1964, but the opposite may be true – the club chose the name to reflect the already popular craze of go-go dancing.25 Many 1960s-era club-goers wore miniskirts and knee-high, high-heeled boots, which eventually came to be called go-go boots. Nightclub promoters in the mid‑1960s thought of the idea of making women dress in these outfits to entertain patrons. The term go-go comes from the phrase "go-go-go" for a person with a lot of energy and was influenced by the French expression a gogo, that means "in abundance, galore", which is derived from the ancient French word la gogue for "joy, happiness". In June 1964, Carol Doda began go-go dancing topless, after having had her breasts implanted with silicone, at the Condor Club on Broadway and Columbus in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. She became the world's most famous go-go dancer, dancing at the Condor for 22 years. Go-go dancers began to be hired on a regular basis at the Whiskey a Go Go on the Sunset