topic Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt in Fashion

RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

Bookplate — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 22:05:58 GMT

From today's NYT:

What’s a nice Jewish viscountess to do when she has a title but no money, a party invitation but no clothes and a pair of scissors but no sewing skills?

Invent the poodle skirt, of course.

That, quite by accident, is what Juli Lynne Charlot did in late 1947, in the process creating a totem of midcentury material culture as evocative as the saddle shoe, the Hula-Hoop and the pink plastic lawn flamingo.

Ms. Charlot, a New York native who died at her home in Tepoztlán, Mexico, on Sunday at 101, had been a Hollywood singer before her marriage in the mid-1940s to a viscount, or British nobleman. Fashion conscious but hopeless with a needle, she stumbled by necessity onto a pattern for a striking skirt that involved no sewing: Take a large swath of solid-colored felt, cut it into an expansive circle, adorn it with jaunty appliquéd figures in contrasting colors, snip a hole in the center and pop yourself in.

The result, the embellished circle skirt, was ubiquitous throughout the 1950s, bought in droves by women and, in particular, adolescent girls. With its voluminous fabric that flared prettily when the wearer twirled, it was just the thing for a sock hop.

Over the years, circle skirts by Ms. Charlot and her many imitators came adorned with a range of figurative appliqués, often comprising small visual narratives. But because the garment’s most popular incarnation sported images of poodles, all such skirts came generically to be known 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 define it as “a skirt with enough cloth to slipcover New Jersey with a big poodle appliquéd on it.”

Born quite literally of postwar abundance — fabric was no longer in short supply — the poodle skirt merged seamlessly with the youth culture of the 1950s, a set of glad rags that appeared to presage a carefree era. Never mind the Cold War, the skirt seemed to say: We’re gonna rock around the clock.

In later years, the poodle skirt became visual shorthand for the entire decade. Even now, a production of “Grease” or “Bye Bye Birdie” can scarcely be mounted without one in evidence.

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 child, her family moved to Southern California. There, her father, an electrician, and her mother, an embroiderer, plied their trades at Hollywood studios.

“It was easier to be poor in a benign climate,” Ms. Charlot said in 2017, at 94, in an interview for this obituary that ranged over her singing career (“I still have a voice, by the way”); her improbable 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 fashion designer.

Young Shirley’s school friends included entertainers-to-be like the future Judy Garland, the future Ann Miller and the future Lana Turner. Possessed of a fine soprano voice, she began taking voice lessons at 13, determined to become an opera singer. “I was going to be the greatest exponent of Mozart,” she said.

Because she thought Shirley no fit 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 with Xavier Cugat’s orchestra. During World War II she appeared with the Marx Brothers on a tour of stateside military bases.

Throughout her performing years, she designed her own wardrobe. Because she had refused to learn to sew (“I didn’t want to be a drudge, like my mother,” she said), she hired a seamstress to realize her designs in cloth.

Ms. Charlot had no shortage of “celebrity admirers,” she said, among them Harold Lloyd, Gary Cooper and Isaac Stern, the violinist.

She married four times, “to two millionaires, a royal count and a son of a” — and here she paused for dramatic effect — “baron.”

The first marriage, to the first millionaire, “didn’t really count,” Ms. Charlot said. They were divorced after three days.

Just after the war, she eloped 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 also, she learned only later, a viscount.

At his request, she gave up her career, settling for life as a stay-at-home viscountess. Her husband found work as a Hollywood film editor.

In December 1947, she was invited to a Hollywood Christmas party. 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 by then had a small children’s wear factory. She gave her daughter a vast sheet of white felt.

Out came the scissors, and before long, Ms. Charlot found herself at the center of a white circle skirt.

“I worked out the hole with my brother’s slide rule: C = 2πr,” she said in 2017. She could sew just well enough by hand to appliqué green felt Christmas trees onto the background.

“My mother had a cigar box full of little tchotchkes that she used in her work,” she said. “Those went onto 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 Beverly Hills boutique. They sold out.

After the holidays, the store requested a nonseasonal design. She created a tableau of dachshunds chasing each other around the skirt. Once the dachshunds sold, the store suggested she turn her attention to poodles. French poodles were très chic at the time, and many customers owned them.

The poodles pummeled the dachshunds.

Image

Today, Ms. Charlot’s skirts are prized by collectors of vintage clothing and can sell for many hundreds of dollars each.

Before long, Ms. Charlot had a poodle-skirt factory. She made skirts adorned with images of frogs and lily pads, Parisian street scenes, galloping racehorses, cascading flowers, and champagne glasses and pink elephants, along with coordinating blouses, dresses, hats and handbags.

By the early 1950s, her skirts were selling for about $35 apiece — some $400 in today’s money.

Because Ms. Charlot’s business skills were, by her own account, on par with her sewing, her factory floundered at first. “Mother hocked her diamond ring three weeks in a row to help me meet the payroll,” she told the news service United Press in 1953.

But with the help of an investor — and with orders from exclusive department stores, including 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 vintage clothing and can sell for many hundreds of dollars each.

Ms. Charlot’s marriage to her viscount did not endure. At the height of her success as a designer, she was summoned to tea by his mother. “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 loved her husband deeply, she gave him a divorce, she said, so he could recoup 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. He had not troubled to tell her, she discovered, that he had been married to two women previously and had never quite bothered to divorce either.

Ms. Charlot leaves no immediate family.

In later years, Ms. Charlot, whose death was confirmed by her friend Carol Hopkins, manufactured contemporary renditions of traditional Mexican wedding dresses. She had lived in Tepoztlán, south of Mexico City, since the 1980s.

By the height of the Swinging Sixties, the miniskirt had put paid to the poodle. But before that happened, a young woman was captured in a press photograph that

the reach of Ms. Charlot’s work.

Image

The future Queen Elizabeth II in a poodle skirt at a hoe down in Canada in 1951.Credit...The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

The time was 1951, and the place was Ottawa, where the woman was attending a hoedown at the home of Canada’s governor general. At 25, she had never seen a hoedown, and was tutored privately in its mysteries before the dancing began.

The woman, attired in a steel blue circle skirt by Ms. Charlot appliquéd with hearts, flowering branches and stylized figures of Romeo and Juliet, acquitted herself admirably, according to news reports.

Her name was Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, and she would be known from the next year on as Queen Elizabeth II.

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

Margalit Fox is a former senior writer on the obituaries desk at The Times. She was previously an editor at the Book Review. She has written the send-offs of some of the best-known cultural figures of our era, including Betty Friedan, Maya Angelou and Seamus Heaney.

***edited to remove links

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

cheriere — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 16:25:58 GMT

@Bookplate What a wonderful lady and contribution the poodle skirt was! I can remember when I was in middle school, we had our first dance with the 50s being the theme. Girls and boys were to wear clothing of this era.

My mother spent two days sewing me a long, full turquoise poodle skirt! This is one of my favorite memories.❤️

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

Jk9 — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 16:28:55 GMT

I borrowed one in the 80's for a party. They were considered precious items then and hard to find really nice ones. RIP to the inventor.

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

sugarbee — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 16:55:54 GMT

@BookplateThank you for posting a wonderful story that brings back such fond memories. I still have my beautiful full half slips that went under the skirts to make them stand out. It was a struggle to rodeo your skirt and slips in place as took your place in class.

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

Still Raining — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 16:58:04 GMT

That photo of the queen in her high heels reminds me of the quote about women dancing backward in high heels....

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

meallen616 — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 17:24:03 GMT

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

KathyM23 — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 17:41:41 GMT

@sugarbee Do you mean by full half slip the crinolin? Not sure of the spelling, but if we are referring to the same thing that is what we called them. I remember wearing one underneath a full blue taffeta shirt with red trim.

BTW I had a grey felt poodle skirt that I wore.

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

cheriere — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 17:50:19 GMT

@KathyM23 wrote:
@sugarbee Do you mean by full half slip the crinolin? Not sure of the spelling, but if we are referring to the same thing that is what we called them. I remember wearing one underneath a full blue taffeta shirt with red trim.

BTW I had a grey felt poodle skirt that I wore.

I wore a crinolin that someone in my family had saved in a chest for years under the poodle skirt my mom made me for the dance. I felt like a princess!

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

ROMARY — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 17:59:38 GMT

I wouldn't mind seeing a revival of the 'poodle skirt'.........

Would be cute! As a novelty item.

Maybe Isaac M. or Dennis B. ?

Well, it's worth a thought......

Hey,,,,,,,,Maybe a poodle SWEATER?

Just one poodle at the shoulder.

Light pink sweater with black poodle!

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

Northray — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 18:06:40 GMT

Thanks for the story. She was a very cool lady.

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

sugarbee — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 19:13:34 GMT

@KathyM23 @cheriere Yes, crinolin was the correct name. I have one in black and one in red. My slips would look great with your grey poodle skirt!

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

ECBG — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 19:15:10 GMT

@Bookplate

Thank you for all of your hard work. Terrific post!!!!

I enjoyed it very much.

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

Mz iMac — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 19:17:00 GMT

I remember wearing a poodle skirt w/a crinoline. I must have been about 4-5 yrs old at the time. I remember twirling around watching the poodles as I was spinning around.

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

bmorechick — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 22:56:40 GMT

I was born in 1955 so by the time I was wearing skirts, it was the mini and micro mini and yes, with heels!! However, the pictures here remind me of the pictures my mom had of herself and her sisters in those skirts and peep toe pumps. They all had tiny waists and look great in the skirts. Like me, my mom said she would dance for hours every weekend in those heels. No wonder we all have great legs!

Great article!

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

patbz — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 23:15:28 GMT

I went thru elementary and middle school in the 50s and was gifted a beautiful poodle skirt around 5th grade. Proudly wore that skirt with a 70yd crinoline ( it was in 4 tiers; that was the total yardage). I also owned a hoop slip that was worn under circle skirts ( I hope that under garment never comes back in style).

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

luvmyteddy4 — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 01:09:23 GMT

come on lets bring back wool felt!

I would buy another poodle skirt!

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

SaveTheTurtles — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 02:04:04 GMT

Quite iconic as a fashion piece that's for sure.

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

FancyPhillyshopper — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 02:12:40 GMT

Thank you for sharing such a wonderful and detailed historical fashion summary!

Nowadays new poodle skirts are often sold as Halloween costumes, so the style lives on.

Re: RIP Inventor of the Poodle Skirt

Sooner — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 02:51:01 GMT

I was really little when they were popular and never understood the trend. Why would you want dogs on your skirt, especially in felt? Made no sense.