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What’s a pleasant Jewish viscountess to do when she has a title however no cash, a party invitation however no garments and a pair of scissors however no stitching expertise?
Invent the poodle skirt, after all.
That, fairly by chance, is what Juli Lynne Charlot did in late 1947, within the course of making a totem of midcentury materials tradition as evocative because the saddle shoe, the Hula-Hoop and the pink plastic garden flamingo.
Ms. Charlot, a New York native who died at 101 on Sunday at her house in Tepoztlán, Mexico, had been a Hollywood singer earlier than her marriage within the mid-Nineteen Forties to a viscount, or British nobleman. Fashion acutely aware however hopeless with a needle, she stumbled by necessity onto a sample for a placing skirt that concerned no stitching: Take a big swath of solid-colored felt, reduce it into an expansive circle, adorn it with jaunty appliquéd figures in contrasting colours, snip a gap within the middle and pop your self in.
The outcome, the embellished circle skirt, was ubiquitous all through the Nineteen Fifties, purchased in droves by girls and, particularly, adolescent ladies. With its voluminous material that flared prettily when the wearer twirled, it was simply the factor for a sock hop.
Over the years, circle skirts by Ms. Charlot and her many imitators got here adorned with a spread of figurative appliqués, typically comprising small visible narratives. But as a result of the garment’s hottest incarnation sported photos of poodles, all such skirts got here generically to be often called poodle skirts.
“When I used to be an adolescent, each woman in the whole Western world wore a poodle skirt,” the humorist Erma Bombeck wrote in a 1984 column. She went on to outline it as “a skirt with sufficient material to slipcover New Jersey with an enormous poodle appliquéd on it.”
Born fairly actually of postwar abundance — material was now not briefly provide — the poodle skirt merged seamlessly with the youth tradition of the Nineteen Fifties, a set of glad rags that appeared to presage a carefree period. Never thoughts the Cold War, the skirt appeared to say: We’re gonna rock across the clock.
In later years, the poodle skirt grew to become visible shorthand for the whole decade. Even now, a manufacturing of “Grease” or “Bye Bye Birdie” can scarcely be mounted with out one in proof.
The daughter of Phillip and Betty (Cohen) Agin, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Ms. Charlot was born Shirley Agin in Manhattan on Oct. 26, 1922.
When she was a baby, her household moved to Southern California. There, her father, an electrician, and her mom, an embroiderer, plied their trades at Hollywood studios.
“It was simpler to be poor in a benign local weather,” Ms. Charlot mentioned in 2017, at 94, in an interview for this obituary that ranged over her singing profession (“I nonetheless have a voice, by the way in which”); her inconceivable stage appearances with the Marx Brothers (“I used to be very stunning then”); her penchant for marriage and romance (“I used to be at all times in love with any individual”); and her work as a self-taught designer.
Young Shirley’s faculty associates included entertainers-to-be like the longer term Judy Garland, the longer term Ann Miller and the longer term Lana Turner. Possessed of a advantageous soprano voice, she started taking voice classes at 13, decided to turn into an opera singer. “I used to be going to be the best exponent of Mozart,” she mentioned.
Because she thought Shirley no match title for a diva, she adopted the skilled title Juli Lynne.
After graduating from Hollywood High School, she sang with the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera and with Xavier Cugat’s orchestra. During World War II, she appeared with the Marx Brothers on a tour of stateside army bases.
Throughout her performing years, she designed her personal wardrobe. Because she had refused to be taught to stitch (“I didn’t need to be a drudge, like my mom”), she employed a seamstress to comprehend her designs in material.
Ms. Charlot had no scarcity of “movie star admirers,” she mentioned, amongst them Harold Lloyd, Gary Cooper and Isaac Stern, the violinist.
She married 4 instances, “to 2 millionaires, a royal rely and a son of a” — and right here she paused for dramatic impact — “baron.”
The first marriage, to the primary millionaire, “didn’t actually matter,” Ms. Charlot mentioned. They have been divorced after three days.
Just after the warfare, she eloped to Las Vegas with Philip Charlot, an officer within the British Royal Navy. The son of a French father and an English mom, he was additionally, she realized solely later, a viscount.
At his request, she gave up her profession, settling for all times as a stay-at-home viscountess. Her husband discovered work as a Hollywood movie editor.
In December 1947, she was invited to a Hollywood Christmas party. She had nothing appropriate to put on and no cash: Her husband had lately misplaced his job.
A fairy godmother intervened within the particular person of Ms. Charlot’s mom, who by then had a babies’s put on manufacturing facility. She gave her daughter an unlimited sheet of white felt.
Out got here the scissors, and earlier than lengthy, Ms. Charlot discovered herself on the middle of a white circle skirt.
“I labored out the outlet with my brother’s slide rule: C = 2πr,” she mentioned in 2017. She may sew simply properly sufficient by hand to appliqué inexperienced felt Christmas bushes onto the background.
“My mom had a cigar field stuffed with little tchotchkes that she utilized in her work,” she mentioned. “Those went onto the Christmas bushes as decorations.”
The skirt was “an enormous hit” on the party, she recalled.
She made a number of related skirts and took them to a Beverly Hills boutique. They bought out.
After the vacations, the shop requested a nonseasonal design. She created a tableau of dachshunds chasing each other across the skirt. Once the dachshunds bought, the shop prompt she flip her consideration to poodles. French poodles have been très stylish on the time, and many shoppers owned them.
The poodles pummeled the dachshunds.
Ms. Charlot quickly had a poodle-skirt manufacturing facility. She made skirts adorned with photos of frogs and lily pads, Parisian road scenes, galloping racehorses, cascading flowers and champagne glasses and pink elephants, together with coordinating blouses, clothes, hats and purses.
By the early Nineteen Fifties, her skirts have been promoting for about $35 apiece — some $400 in at present’s cash.
Because Ms. Charlot’s enterprise expertise have been, by her personal account, on par along with her stitching, her manufacturing facility floundered at first. “Mother hocked her diamond ring three weeks in a row to assist me meet the payroll,” she advised the information service United Press in 1953.
But with the assistance of an investor — and with orders from unique department shops, together with Bullock’s Wilshire in Los Angeles, Neiman Marcus in Dallas and Bergdorf Goodman in New York — her future was assured.
Today, Ms. Charlot’s skirts are prized by collectors of classic clothes and may promote for a lot of lots of of {dollars} every.
Her marriage to her viscount didn’t endure. At the peak of her success as a designer, she was summoned to tea by his mom. “The extra profitable you turn into, the much less profitable he turns into,” she recalled her mother-in-law saying. “You are destroying my son.”
Though Ms. Charlot liked her husband deeply, she gave him a divorce, she mentioned, so he may recoup his life.
Ms. Charlot’s third marriage, to the second millionaire, resulted in divorce, as did her fourth, to the Mexican-born son of a German baron. He had not troubled to inform her, she found, that he had been married to 2 girls beforehand and had by no means fairly bothered to divorce both.
She leaves no instant household.
In later years, Ms. Charlot, whose loss of life was confirmed by her good friend Carol Hopkins, manufactured modern renditions of conventional Mexican marriage ceremony clothes. She had lived in Tepoztlán, south of Mexico City, because the Nineteen Eighties.
By the peak of the Swinging Sixties, the miniskirt had put paid to the poodle. But earlier than that occurred, a younger girl was captured in a press {photograph} that betrayed the attain of Ms. Charlot’s work.
The time was 1951, and the place was Ottawa, the place the girl was attending a hoedown on the house of Canada’s governor basic. At 25, she had by no means seen a hoedown, and was tutored privately in its mysteries earlier than the dancing started.
The girl, attired in a metal blue circle skirt by Ms. Charlot appliquéd with hearts, flowering branches and stylized figures of Romeo and Juliet, acquitted herself admirably, in response to information experiences.
Her title was Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, and he or she can be identified from the following yr on as Queen Elizabeth II.
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
