![]() ![]() Cohn’s designs featured fringe and fanciful trims, gold and silver lamé, and his signature gems and rhinestones.Ĭohn still felt the draw of the Wild West. Helen “Bobbie” Barbara Kruger and Cohn married in 1933 in Mankato in 1934, they packed up and moved to New York City, where they opened Nudie’s for the Ladies, a costume shop that catered to strippers and showgirls with hand-embroidered G-strings and pasties, on 49th Street and Broadway. When the stock market crashed soon after, Cohn left the big city and made his way to Mankato, Minnesota, where he rented a room in a boarding house and fell in love again, with the oldest daughter of the boarding house proprietor. ![]() ![]() Then he fell in love with a young, aspiring starlet, who swept him so swiftly off his feet that he closed up shop and followed her back to New York City. In 1922, he gathered enough money to open a small tailor and dry-cleaning shop in West Hollywood. But Cohn soon learned he could find more success cutting fabric he had already watched his older brother Julius find success as a brassiere maker. The boxing gig took him to Hollywood, where he found work as a negative cutter in film production. Weighing in at a skin-and-bones 106 pounds, the teenage Cohn had an obvious disadvantage in the ring, but the crowd loved his scrappy demeanor and strong will to survive. First, he settled in Brooklyn, where he earned his living any way he could: shoeshine boy, errand runner for vaudeville star Eddie Cantor and, eventually, boxer. Nuta Kotlyarenko Americanized his surname as Cohn, and family lore holds that when an intake clerk at Ellis Island misunderstood his first name, he suddenly became Nudie, a moniker that would stick with him throughout his life.Įlvis Presley wore a gold lamé Nudie suit on the cover of his 1959 hit album, 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong.Ĭohn’s rags-to-riches story took him back and forth across the continent, and, like many such stories, it’s full of thrilling details that are tricky to confirm. An estimated 100,000 Jewish people would eventually be killed, maimed or tortured in pogroms in newly independent Ukraine between 19. ![]() were lined with gold, and that’s where he needed to be,” says Jamie Nudie, Cohn’s granddaughter, 62, who also recalls the lullabies her grandfather sang to her in his native Ukrainian, to help her drift off to sleep. “His mama would always tell him the streets in the U.S. In 1913, they decided to send 11-year-old Nuta and his brother Julius off on a ship bound for New York City. In the early 1900s, pogroms across the Russian Empire killed thousands of Jews, and Nuta Kotlyarenko’s parents rightfully feared for their lives. His idol was Tom Mix, the star of almost 300 early Western films between 19. Little Nuta first encountered the Wild West there, when he wasn’t helping his mother sell candy and cigarettes, as he watched dazzling American cowboys ride their horses across the silver screen. She also ran a small concession stand at the local movie theater on Saturday afternoons. His father was a bootmaker, while his mother raised geese to send to market. Nuta Kotlyarenko was born to a Ukrainian Jewish family in Kyiv, in what was then the Russian Empire, in 1902, when ethnic Jews were regularly subjected to pogroms-violent, mob-like massacres officially mandated by the local Russian authorities. “He wanted his clothing and his name to be as iconic as the actors and musicians who wore them.” “Nudie Cohn didn’t just seek to dress the stars-he wanted to be part of the Hollywood story,” says Ashley Kowalski, curator of collections at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth. His flamboyant, rhinestone-bedazzled, colorfully embroidered “Nudie suits” have been worn by celebrities across the spectrum of style: Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Gram Parsons, John Wayne, Cher, Ronald Reagan, ZZ Top, Elton John, Porter Wagoner, Robert Mitchum, Glen Campbell and the Monkees. After the Ukrainian Jewish refugee arrived in New York City in 1914 with pennies in his pocket, he worked his way up from a shoeshine boy to boxer to one of the most sought-after costume designers in American music history. Nudie Cohn lived and breathed the American dream. ![]()
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