Elvis Rhinestone Designer Died

The woman who helped clothe Elvis Presley in his rhinestone outfits has died at the age of 92. Helen Cohn, also known as Bobbie Nudie, died in California on Friday. Cohn worked alongside her husband Nudie Cohn, clothing a host of singing cowboys and country singers including Hank Williams and Roy Rogers. Their outfits included a gold lame suit for Presley.

Presley wore the $10,000 outfit on the front of his 1959 compilation album 50,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong. Cohn and her husband were an inseparable business team until his death in 1984.

Helen Barbara Kruger met her future husband, a Ukrainian immigrant, at her mother's boarding house in Mankato, Minnesota. They married and moved to New York where they opened Nudie's for the Ladies, selling underwear and outfits to showgirls and burlesque dancers in the 1930s. In the 1940s, after hitchhiking across the country several times, they settled in Los Angeles and began creating what would become the famous suits.