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This text is a part of Ignored, a collection of obituaries about outstanding individuals whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Instances.
To many modern ladies within the mid-Twentieth century, no hat was value sporting until it was made by Otto Lucas.
A London-based milliner, Lucas designed stylish turbans, berets and cloches, usually constructed from luxe velvets and silks and adorned with flowers or feathers.
His designs made it onto the covers of magazines like British Vogue, and onto the heads of purchasers who reportedly included the actresses Greta Garbo and Gene Tierney, and the Duchesses of Windsor and Kent.
The identify Otto Lucas was ubiquitous in England, and on the top of his success, he bought hundreds of hats every year world wide.
“He will need to have been essentially the most well-known milliner of the ’60s,” Philip Somerville, an assistant to Lucas who later designed hats for Queen Elizabeth II, advised The Liverpool Echo in 1984. “His identify was God within the hat world.”
But at the same time as his sharp intuition for fashion and traits made him a pre-eminent identify in millinery, he struggled as a German-born Jew in World Warfare II-era Britain, and as a homosexual man in a rustic that criminalized gay acts. He lived one thing of a double life, flaunting a glamorous way of life to the surface world whereas privately searching for out protected havens for queer individuals.
Otto Lucas was born on July 9, 1903, in Mülheim, Germany, to Jacob and Dina Lucas, each German Jews. His father was a horse dealer, and he had a sister, Erna.
Particulars about Lucas’s formative years are scarce, however the scholar Anna Nyburg wrote in “The Garments on Our Backs: How Refugees From Nazism Revitalised the British Vogue Commerce” (2020) that he skilled as a milliner in Paris and should have labored in Berlin earlier than shifting to London round 1932. Three years later he was operating a profitable store on New Bond Road, recognized for its high-end boutiques.
With the outbreak of World Warfare II, about 70,000 Germans and Austrians, lots of them Jews, have been labeled as “enemy aliens” beneath the British authorities.
Lucas’s mother and father, who left Germany for the Netherlands in 1936, have been deported to Auschwitz in 1943, and have been killed there quickly after. Lucas was interned at a camp on the Isle of Man from June to September of 1940.
As soon as the battle ended, Lucas’s worldwide status exploded. He was exporting shipments of hats to Australia by 1946, and started touring to showcase them, incomes worldwide consideration.
“I consider all stunning ladies” when designing hats, Lucas advised UPI in 1948. “Any lady on the earth might put on them.”
Whereas he was on a visit to the USA in 1948, The New York Instances described a few of his creations: “a black taffeta, worn stage on the pinnacle and massed with bows on the again”; a bonnet manufactured from “inexperienced and pink striped satin” with “roses nestling at one facet.”
The Los Angeles Instances reported that Lucas, “Bond Road’s mad hatter,” bought 103 hats in two days at Saks Fifth Avenue.
“What makes Otto Lucas’ hats completely different?” The Philadelphia Inquirer requested in 1953, including, “There’s little doubt about it, his hats have class however with a disarming form of appeal.”
Lucas described his technique succinctly to The Sydney Morning Herald in 1955: “I regard hat-making as an artwork and a science.”
In 1961, Lucas turned a naturalized citizen of England, the place he equipped hats to high-end malls like Harrods and Fortnum & Mason, began a fast-selling line of extra reasonably priced hats known as Otto Lucas Junior and confirmed his creations at London Vogue Week.
“Hats are my mad extravagance, I purchase a number of a yr from Otto Lucas,” Beryl Maudling, a former actress and dancer, advised The Each day Herald in 1963. “However when you’re as small as I’m, an essential hat is important — provides you ‘presence.’”
Lucas designed particular editions of hats to rejoice Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953, giving them names like “Tiara,” “Dream Princess” and “Crown Jewels,” and he created traces for feminine athletes throughout the 1960 Summer time Olympics in Rome and the 1964 Summer time Video games in Tokyo.
By the Fifties, he had a employees of greater than 100 individuals, together with three designers who have been normally employed from Paris.
Carole Cornish, a graphic designer who made hats for Lucas in 1964 and 1965, stated in an interview that he was “very sensible” and “not disagreeable,” however that he might be explicit. “There could be arguments if the designer needed to do one thing and he didn’t,” she stated.
However, Cornish stated, working at his enterprise might be thrilling, significantly when royalty visited the showroom. “We did really feel fairly privileged that we have been working for such a high-powered man,” she stated.
All of it translated to huge monetary success. Rolf Andersen, Lucas’s accomplice for about 10 years, advised Nyburg in an interview for “The Garments on Our Backs” that Lucas wore customized fits, drank a number of Champagne and was chauffeured round in a Rolls-Royce. The couple lived in a swanky space of London with two poodles, Olga and Whisky, and had a rustic residence in Kent, in southeast England, with acres upon acres of lavish gardens.
Although gay acts have been criminalized in Britain till 1967, Cornish stated that she and others who labored for Lucas have been conscious that he was homosexual. Lucas was additionally a mainstay on the Colony Room Membership, a hang-out for artists and bohemians within the Soho neighborhood of London that welcomed gays and lesbians, and he was a detailed buddy of the proprietor, Muriel Belcher, a lesbian who was pretty open about her personal sexuality.
Lucas died in a aircraft crash in Belgium on Oct. 2, 1971, whereas en route from London to Salzburg, Austria. All 55 passengers and eight crew members have been killed, in accordance with information studies, after a mechanical failure. Lucas was 68.
A posting in a British newspaper introduced that Lucas’s property, totaling about 150,000 kilos after taxes (about $2.3 million in at this time’s {dollars}), have been left to Andersen. His enterprise was liquidated in 1972.
By some estimates, Lucas bought 55,000 hats in his final yr of enterprise, stated Lucie Whitmore, the lead curator of “Vogue Metropolis,” an exhibition on the Museum of London Docklands about Jewish contributions to British trend that included a piece about Lucas. His creations can nonetheless be discovered on the Victoria and Albert Museum in London they usually typically pop up on eBay, however for essentially the most half, Whitmore stated, after his dying, “his identify disappears actually rapidly.”
Lucas may not have been shocked by this.
“Vogue goes ahead with the instances,” he advised The Morning Herald in 1960. “It’s vivid, important, ever-changing. We milliners will not be involved with something that occurred yesterday.”
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