Have you ever wondered who created that gold lame suit for Elvis Presley? And who created the original rhinestone cowboy look? Or what about rocker Gram Parsons’ outrageous outfit embroidered with pills, marijuana leaves and a giant crucifix?
The answer: Nudie Cohn the Rodeo Tailor
Even though Nudie began his tailoring career selling custom G-strings to strippers in New York, this isn’t how he got his nickname. It originated on Ellis Island when Nuta Kotlyarenko arrived from the Ukraine. Like so many other immigrants, the Ellis Island official misheard Nuta’s name and gave him the name that he arbitrarily chose: Nudie Cohn.
In 1939, Nudie and his family moved to California, and he opened a tailor shop in his garage. His main material cutting surface was a ping pong table.
A fan of Western Swing music, in the early forties, he approached country singer Tex Williams and asked if he could outfit his band. Williams auctioned off a horse and gave Nudie the seed money to start his business. For this, he made free suits for Williams and his band.
In 1947, Nudie opened his Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors store in North Hollywood, where he made stage clothes for stars like Hank Williams, Spade Cooley, Cliffie Stone, and Lefty Frizzell.
Frizzell became the first rhinestone cowboy when Nudie put rhinestone initials on his coat sleeves. Then, he covered Hank Williams’ suit with rhinestone musical notes. He also created Porter Waggoner’s trademark outfit, studded with rhinestones with an embroidered covered wagon on the back.
In 1957, Nudie’s suits became world famous when he designed Elvis’s $10,000 gold lame suit. Besides custom suits, Nudie branched into embroidered boots, belts, and saddles. John Lennon even owned a pair of Nudie boots.
In a recent interview, Nudie’s granddaughter Jamie said, “Here is a guy who got macho cowboy types in the middle of the 20th century to dress in outrageous rhinestone and embroidery.”
Nudie himself was a portrait in eccentricity, wearing his own cowboy clothes and driving his “Nudie Mobile”, a silver dollar-studded Cadillac with pistol door handles and a saddle-type backseat.
Hank Williams Sr. was buried in a Nudie suit. So were Roy Rogers and Buck Owens. When Nudie Cohn died in 1984 at age 81, he was also buried in one of his suits. In 1994, Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors store closed.
For me, Nudie has a personal resonance. In 1976, when I was first hired as a television writer, I attended my first Hollywood party at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Although formal attire was required, I didn’t want to rent or buy a typical monkey suit. So I went to Nudie’s North Hollywood store and met the man himself. Since we were both about the same size, he offered to rent me one of his own suits for the party. It was a white Elvis suit with embroidered cactuses, and it made a smash in that room full of monkey suits at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
From the time that I heard that Nudie had died, I wondered if he was buried in that suit that I had worn to producer Mark Goodson’s Christmas party in 1976.
SOURCES:
Helen Cohn, 92, matriarch of country music couture”, Jon Thurber, Boston Globe, URL: (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/obituaries/articles/2006/04/13/helen_cohn_92_matriarch_of_country_music_couture/)
