Rhinestone Couturier Dead At 92
Helen Cohn, who along with her husband helped clothe Elvis Presley, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and a host of stars in rhinestone creations during the height of cowboy chic, has died. She was 92.
Helen Cohn died Friday at a hospital near her home in Valencia, her granddaughter, Jamie Nudie Mendoza, said Wednesday.
"She was the backbone to my grandfather," said Mendoza. "She ran the store."
Mendoza says her grandmother was also was the inspiration for the Nudie's logo: a naked cowgirl leaning against a fence, twirling a lasso whose coils spelled out the company name.
According to family legend, the logo dates to one evening in the 1940s when she appeared before her husband wearing only a cowboy hat, boots and a holster.
From the 1940s through the 1960s, the now-closed Nudie's Rodeo Tailor store in North Hollywood was where singing cowboys, country singers and many an actor went to load up on sparkly duds. A gold lamé suit for Presley and an outfit embroidered with pills and marijuana leaves for singer Gram Parsons weren't even the gaudiest of Cohn's creations.
Cohn and her husband, Nudie Cohn, were an inseparable business team until his death in 1984. She ran the business for another decade before retiring.
In the early days, Helen helped her husband sew outfits on a pingpong table in the garage. She wound up handling the business end of Nudie's for 50 years.
In the 1960s, when America was letting it all hang out, Nudie's famed cowgirl went the other direction – and became clothed, after Nudie Cohn converted from Judaism to Christianity.
Helen Barbara Kruger met her future husband, a Ukrainian immigrant, at her mother's boarding house in Mankato, Minn.
They married and moved to New York City, where they opened Nudie's for the Ladies, selling G-strings and other outfits to showgirls and burlesque dancers in the 1930s. They later returned to Minnesota and ran a tailoring and dry cleaning shop.
In the 1940s, after hitchhiking across the country several times, they settled in North Hollywood and began creating what would become the famous Nudie's suits.
According to the company's web site, Helen and Nudie Cohn had an all-access pass to the world of rock and roll, costuming stars including John Lennon, George Harrison, Elton John, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, David Lee Roth, k.d.lang, ZZ Top, Cher, Chicago, David Allan Coe, Ricky Nelson, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.
Playing the cowboy card to great success, Nudie's claimed among its clients actors Gene Autry, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Charlton Heston, Ronald Reagan, Robert Mitchum, Michael Landon, Robert Redford, Goldie Hawn, Jon Voigt, Ann Margret, and Arnold Schwarzenegger
The company also says it dressed Hank Williams Sr. and Jr., Johnny Cash, Glenn Campbell, George Jones, Buck Owens, Dean Martin, Lou Rawls, Merv Griffin, Suzy Quattro, 1960s fashion icon Twiggy, piano and candelabra showman Liberace, and talk show/game show impresario Merv Griffin.