Bobbie Nudie, Purveyor of Glitter to Rhinestone Cowboys, Dies at 92
from the NY Times
Helen Cohn, whose suspicions that life could turn peculiar after she said yes to a man named Nudie were confirmed as she helped him in his life’s mission, putting lots and lots of rhinestones on country singers’ suits, died on April 7 in Valencia, Calif. She was 92.
Her granddaughter Jamie Nudie announced her death.
Her husband, Nudie Cohn, got his name when Ellis Island officials botched his real name, Nuta Kotlyarenko. He aspired to show business, beginning his trip to fame by shining shoes in front of the Palace Theater on Broadway.
His young wife, whom he had renamed Bobbie Nudie, possibly with her permission, was present at the creation of Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors in North Hollywood, Calif., which opened in 1947. The couple soon found celebrity by selling wildly embroidered, rhinestone-studded duds to cowboy stars, country singers and, yes, Elvis Presley. (A $10,000 gold lamé number made the cover of Rolling Stone and netted a profit of $9,950.)
The shop produced preposterously gaudy clothes, now museum pieces, for Hank Williams Sr., Buck Owens, Clint Eastwood, John Lennon, Roy Rogers, and Dale Evans, a special chum of Mrs. Cohn.
Mrs. Cohn, who clung to her married name legally, helped her husband sew in the early years, juggled the nuts and bolts of the business for a half century, and, most important, usually managed to keep her exuberant tailoring genius pretty near the straight and narrow. The story of how she inspired the logo the company used on its labels for more than 20 years sounds too good to be true, but her granddaughter is sticking to it. One evening in the early 1940’s, she emerged from the boudoir wearing nothing but a cowboy hat, boots and a holster, and coyly asked her husband, “When are you going to make the rest of the outfit?”
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