What can a nice Jewish viscountess do when she has a title but no money, a party invitation but no clothes, and scissors but no sewing skills?
Invent the poodle skirt, of course.
That’s what Juli Lynne Charlot did, quite by accident, in late 1947, creating a totem of material midcentury culture as impressive as the saddle shoe, the hula hoop, and the pink plastic lawn flamingo.
Ms. Charlot, a native New Yorker who died Sunday at age 101 at her home in Tepoztlán, Mexico, had been a Hollywood singer before her marriage in the mid-1940s to a Viscount, a British nobleman. Fashion-conscious but hopeless with a needle, she inevitably stumbled upon a pattern for a statement skirt that required no sewing: Take a large strip of plain felt, cut it into a wide circle, and decorate it with jaunty, appliquéd figures in contrasting colors, cut a hole in the middle and slip into it.
The result, the embellished circle skirt, was ubiquitous in the 1950s and purchased in droves by women and especially adolescent girls. With its voluminous fabric that expands nicely as the wearer turns, it was just the thing for a sock hop.
Over the years, the circle skirts of Ms. Charlot and her many imitators have been decorated with a range of figurative appliqués, often containing small visual narratives. But because the most popular version of the garment featured images of poodles, all skirts of this style were commonly referred to as poodle skirts.
“When I was a teenager, every girl in the entire Western world wore a poodle skirt,” humorist Erma Bombeck wrote in a 1984 column. She further defined it as “a skirt with enough fabric to cover New Jersey, with a large poodle applique.”
Born in the truest sense of the word from the abundance of the post-war period – fabrics were no longer in short supply – the poodle skirt merged seamlessly with the youth culture of the 1950s, a series of cheerful rags that seemed to herald a carefree era. Not to mention the Cold War, rock seemed to say: We’re going to rock 24/7.
In later years, the poodle skirt became the visual shorthand for the entire decade. Even today, hardly any production of “Grease” or “Bye Bye Birdie” can take place without such a performance.
The daughter of Phillip and Betty (Cohen) Agin, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Ms. Charlot was born Shirley Agin on October 26, 1922, in Manhattan.
When she was a child, her family moved to Southern California. There her father, an electrician, and her mother, an embroiderer, pursued their profession in Hollywood studios.
“It was easier to be poor in a favorable climate,” Ms. Charlot said in 2017, at age 94, in an interview for this obituary, which focused on her singing career (“I still have a voice, by the way”); her unlikely stage appearances with the Marx Brothers (“I was very beautiful then”); her preference for marriage and romance (“I was always in love with someone”); and her work as a self-taught fashion designer.
Young Shirley’s school friends included aspiring entertainers such as the future Judy Garland, the future Ann Miller and the future Lana Turner. She had a beautiful soprano voice and began taking singing lessons at the age of 13, determined to become an opera singer. “I wanted to be the greatest Mozart interpreter,” she said.
Because she felt that Shirley was not an appropriate name for a diva, she adopted the professional name Juli Lynne.
After graduating from Hollywood High School, she sang with the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera and in Xavier Cugat’s orchestra. During World War II, she performed with the Marx Brothers on a tour of military bases in the United States.
During her performing years, she designed her own wardrobe. Because she had refused to learn to sew (“I didn’t want to be a laborer like my mother”), she hired a seamstress to turn her designs into fabric.
Ms. Charlot had no shortage of “prominent admirers,” she said, including Harold Lloyd, Gary Cooper and Isaac Stern, the violinist.
She married four times “two millionaires, a royal count and the son of” – and here she paused dramatically – “the baron.”
The first marriage to the first millionaire “didn’t really count,” Ms. Charlot said. They were divorced after three days.
Shortly after the war, she escaped to Las Vegas with Philip Charlot, an officer in the British Royal Navy. The son of a French father and an English mother, he was, as she only later learned, also a viscount.
At his request, she gave up her career and settled for life as a housewife and viscountess. Her husband found work as a film editor in Hollywood.
In December 1947 she was invited to a Christmas party in Hollywood. She had nothing suitable to wear and no money: her husband had recently lost his job.
A fairy godmother intervened in the person of Ms. Charlot’s mother, who now owned a small children’s clothing factory. She gave her daughter a huge sheet of white felt.
Pulled out the scissors and soon Ms. Charlot found herself in the middle of a white circle skirt.
“I worked out the hole with my brother’s slide rule: C = 2πr,” she said in 2017. She was just good at hand sewing so she could appliqué green felt Christmas trees to the background.
“My mother had a cigar box full of small cigarettes that she used at work,” she said. “They went on the Christmas trees as decorations.”
The skirt was “a huge hit” at the party, she recalled.
She made several similar skirts and took them to a boutique in Beverly Hills. They were sold out.
After the holidays, the store requested a non-seasonal design. She created a tableau of dachshunds chasing each other around the skirt. After the dachshunds were sold, the store suggested she focus on poodles. French Poodles were very fashionable back then and were owned by many customers.
The poodles hit the dachshunds.
Today, Ms. Charlot’s skirts are highly prized by vintage clothing collectors and can sell for several hundred dollars each.
Mrs. Charlot soon had a poodle skirt factory. She made skirts decorated with images of frogs and water lilies, Parisian street scenes, galloping racehorses, cascading flowers, champagne glasses and pink elephants, as well as matching blouses, dresses, hats and handbags.
In the early 1950s, her skirts sold for about $35 each – about $400 today.
Since Ms. Charlot’s business skills were, according to her own statements, equal to her skills as a seamstress, her factory initially faltered. “Mother turned her diamond ring upside down three weeks in a row to help me make the payroll,” she told the United Press in 1953.
But with the help of an investor — and orders from upscale department stores including Bullock’s Wilshire in Los Angeles, Neiman Marcus in Dallas and Bergdorf Goodman in New York — her future was secured.
Today, Ms. Charlot’s skirts are highly prized by vintage clothing collectors and can sell for several hundred dollars each.
Her marriage to her viscount did not last. At the height of her success as a designer, his mother invited her to tea. “The more successful you become, the less successful you become,” she remembers her mother-in-law saying. “You are destroying my son.”
Although Ms. Charlot loved her husband very much, she divorced him, she said, so that he could regain his life.
Ms. Charlot’s third marriage, to the second millionaire, ended in divorce, as did her fourth, to the Mexican-born son of a German baron. As she discovered, he hadn’t bothered to tell her that he had been married to two women before and had never bothered to get a divorce.
She leaves behind no immediate family.
In later years, Ms. Charlot, whose death was confirmed by her friend Carol Hopkins, made contemporary interpretations of traditional Mexican wedding dresses. She had lived in Tepoztlán, south of Mexico City, since the 1980s.
At the height of the Swinging Sixties, the miniskirt had wiped out the poodle. But before that happened, a young woman was captured in a press photo that revealed the reach of Ms. Charlot’s work.
The year was 1951 and the location was Ottawa, where the woman was attending a hoedown at the home of the Canadian Governor General. At 25, she had never seen a hoedown and was given private lessons in its secrets before the dance began.
The woman, dressed in a steel-blue circle skirt by Ms. Charlot with appliqued hearts, flowering branches and stylized figures of Romeo and Juliet, performed admirably, according to news reports.
Her name was Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor and she would be known as Queen Elizabeth II from the next year.
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
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2024-03-06 00:57:42
www.nytimes.com
