What’s a pleasant Jewish viscountess to do when she has a title however no cash, a celebration invitation however no garments and a pair of scissors however no stitching expertise?
Invent the poodle skirt, after all.
That, fairly accidentally, 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 her house in Tepoztlán, Mexico, on Sunday at 101, had been a Hollywood singer earlier than her marriage within the mid-Nineteen Forties to a viscount, or British nobleman. Fashion aware however hopeless with a needle, she stumbled by necessity onto a sample for a hanging skirt that concerned no stitching: Take a big swath of solid-colored felt, lower it into an expansive circle, adorn it with jaunty appliquéd figures in contrasting colours, snip a gap within the heart and pop your self in.
The end result, the embellished circle skirt, was ubiquitous all through the Nineteen Fifties, purchased in droves by ladies and, specifically, adolescent ladies. With its voluminous cloth 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 referred to as poodle skirts.
“When I was a teenager, every girl in the entire 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 enough cloth to slipcover New Jersey with a big poodle appliquéd on it.”
Born fairly actually of postwar abundance — cloth 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 turned visible shorthand for your complete 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 on Oct. 26, 1922, in Manhattan.
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 easier to be poor in a benign climate,” Ms. Charlot stated in 2017, at 94, in an interview for this obituary that ranged over her singing profession (“I still have a voice, by the way”); her inconceivable stage appearances with the Marx Brothers (“I was very beautiful then”); her penchant for marriage and romance (“I was always in love with somebody”); and her work as a self-taught dressmaker.
Young Shirley’s college mates included entertainers-to-be like the longer term Judy Garland, the longer term Ann Miller and the longer term Lana Turner. Possessed of a nice soprano voice, she started taking voice classes at 13, decided to change into an opera singer. “I was going to be the greatest exponent of Mozart,” she stated.
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 study to stitch (“I didn’t want to be a drudge, like my mother,” she stated), she employed a seamstress to comprehend her designs in fabric.
Ms. Charlot had no scarcity of “celebrity admirers,” she stated, amongst them Harold Lloyd, Gary Cooper and Isaac Stern, the violinist.
She married 4 occasions, “to two millionaires, a royal count and a son of a” — and right here she paused for dramatic impact — “baron.”
The first marriage, to the primary millionaire, “didn’t really count,” Ms. Charlot stated. They had 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 discovered 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 get together. She had nothing appropriate to put on and no cash: Her husband had lately misplaced his job.
A fairy godmother intervened within the individual of Ms. Charlot’s mom, who by then had a young children’s put on manufacturing facility. She gave her daughter an enormous sheet of white felt.
Out got here the scissors, and earlier than lengthy, Ms. Charlot discovered herself on the heart of a white circle skirt.
“I worked out the hole with my brother’s slide rule: C = 2πr,” she stated in 2017. She may sew simply effectively sufficient by hand to appliqué inexperienced felt Christmas bushes onto the background.
“My mother had a cigar box full of little tchotchkes that she used in her work,” she stated. “Those went onto the Christmas trees as decorations.”
The skirt was “a huge hit” on the get together, she recalled.
She made a number of comparable 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 one another across the skirt. Once the dachshunds bought, the shop steered she flip her consideration to poodles. French poodles had been très stylish on the time, and many shoppers owned them.
The poodles pummeled the dachshunds.
Before lengthy, Ms. Charlot had a poodle-skirt manufacturing facility. She made skirts adorned with photos of frogs and lily pads, Parisian avenue 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 had been promoting for about $35 apiece — some $400 in at this time’s cash.
Because Ms. Charlot’s enterprise expertise had 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 help me meet the payroll,” she informed 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.
Ms. Charlot’s 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 more successful you become, the less successful he becomes,” she recalled her mother-in-law saying. “You are destroying my son.”
Though Ms. Charlot cherished her husband deeply, she gave him a divorce, she stated, so he may recoup his life.
Ms. Charlot’s third marriage, to the second millionaire, led to 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 ladies beforehand and had by no means fairly bothered to divorce both.
Ms. Charlot leaves no instant household.
In later years, Ms. Charlot, whose demise was confirmed by her pal Carol Hopkins, manufactured modern renditions of conventional Mexican marriage ceremony clothes. She had lived in Tepoztlán, south of Mexico City, for the reason that Nineteen Eighties.
By the peak of the Swinging Sixties, the miniskirt had put paid to the poodle. But earlier than that occurred, a younger lady 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 lady was attending a hoedown on the house of Canada’s governor common. At 25, she had by no means seen a hoedown, and was tutored privately in its mysteries earlier than the dancing started.
The lady, 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, based on information experiences.
Her title was Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, and he or she can be identified from the subsequent 12 months on as Queen Elizabeth II.
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
