What’s a nice Jewish viscountess to do when she has a title but no money, an invitation to a party but no clothes, and a pair of scissors but can’t sew?
Invent the poodle skirt, of course.
This, almost by accident, is what Juli Lynne Charlot did in late 1947, in the process creating a totem of mid-century material culture as evocative as the saddle shoe, the Hula-Hoop, and the pink plastic garden flamingo .
Ms. Charlot, a native of New York who died at her home in Tepoztlán, Mexico, on Sunday at age 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 out of necessity came across a pattern for a surprising skirt that didn’t involve any sewing: take a large strip of solid-colored felt, cut it into a wide circle, adorn it with cheerful appliqué figures in contrasting colors, punch a hole in the center and insert.
The result, the embellished circle skirt, was ubiquitous throughout the 1950s, purchased en masse by women and, in particular, teenage girls. With its voluminous fabric that expanded gracefully as the wearer turned, it was just the thing for a sock.
Over the years, the full skirts of Madame Charlot and her many imitators were adorned with a series of figurative appliqués, often consisting of small visual narratives. But because the most popular incarnation of the garment sported images of poodles, all of these skirts came to be known generically 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 article. She went on to define it as “a skirt with enough fabric to cover a New Jersey lining with a large poodle applied on top”.
Literally born out of post-war abundance (fabric was no longer in short supply), the poodle skirt blended seamlessly with 1950s youth culture, a set of cheerful rags that seemed to presage a carefree era. Never mind the Cold War, the skirt seemed to say: We’re going to rock 24 hours a day.
In later years, the poodle skirt became visual shorthand for the entire decade. Even now, a production of “Grease” or “Bye Bye Birdie” can hardly be staged without one in evidence.
The daughter of Phillip and Betty (Cohen) Agin, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Mrs. 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, combined their activities in the Hollywood studios.
“It was easier to be poor in a benevolent climate,” Ms. Charlot said in 2017, at 94, in an interview for this obituary that spanned her singing career (“I still have a voice, though”); about her unlikely theatrical appearances with the Marx Brothers (“I was very beautiful then”); her passion for marriage and romance (“I have always been in love with someone“); and his work as a self-taught stylist.
Among young Shirley’s schoolmates were future artists such as the future Judy Garland, the future Ann Miller, and the future Lana Turner. Possessing a beautiful soprano voice, she began taking singing lessons at the age of 13, determined to become an opera singer. “I would have become Mozart’s greatest exponent,” she said.
Because she thought Shirley was not a suitable 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 the Xavier Cugat Orchestra. During the Second World War she appeared with the Marx Brothers on a tour of military bases in the United States.
During her years of performing, she designed her own wardrobe. Because she refused to learn to sew (“I didn’t want to be a drudge, like my mother,” she said), she hired a seamstress to make her designs out of fabric.
Ms. Charlot had no shortage of “celebrity admirers,” she said, including Harold Lloyd, Gary Cooper and Isaac Stern, the violinist.
She married four times, “to two millionaires, a royal earl and a son of” – and here she paused for dramatic effect – “baron”.
The first marriage, to the first millionaire, “didn’t really count,” Ms. Charlot said. They divorced after three days.
Soon after the war, she fled to Las Vegas with Philip Charlot, an officer in the British Royal Navy. Son of a French father and an English mother, he was also, as he learned only later, a viscount.
At his request, she gave up her career, settling for a life as a housewife viscountess. Her husband found work as a Hollywood film editor.
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 Madame Charlot’s mother, who by now owned a small children’s clothing factory. She gave her daughter a vast white felt sheet.
They took out the scissors and in a short time Madame Charlot found herself in the center of a white full skirt.
“I made the hole with my brother’s slide rule: C = 2πr,” she said in 2017. She knew how to hand sew well enough to attach green felt Christmas trees to the background.
“My mother had a cigar box full of little trinkets that she used in her work,” he said. “Those ended up on Christmas trees as decorations.”
The skirt was “a big hit” at the party, she recalled.
She made several similar skirts and took them to a boutique in Beverly Hills. They ran out.
After the holidays, the store requested a non-seasonal design. He has created a painting of dachshunds chasing each other around the skirt. Once the dachshunds were sold, the store suggested turns his attention to poodles. French poodles were very chic at the time and many customers owned them.
Poodles punched dachshunds.
Before long, Madame Charlot opened a poodle skirt factory. She made skirts adorned with images of frogs and water lilies, Parisian street scenes, galloping racehorses, cascading flowersAND glasses of champagne and pink elephantsalong with matching blouses, dresses, hats and bags.
In the early 1950sher skirts sold for about $35 each, about $400 today.
Since Mrs. Charlot’s business skills were, in her opinion, on a par with those of sewing, her factory faltered at first. “Mom pawned her diamond ring for three weeks straight to help me pay payroll,” she told the United Press news service in 1953.
But with the help of an investor — and with orders from upscale department stores, including Bullock’s Wilshire in Los Angeles, Neiman Marcus in Dallas and Bergdorf Goodman in New York — its future was assured.
Today, Mrs. Charlot’s skirts are prized by vintage dress collectors and can sell for many hundreds of dollars each.
Madame Charlot’s marriage to her viscount did not last. At the height of her success as a fashion designer, she was invited to tea by her mother. “The more successful you are, the less successful he will be,” she recalled her mother-in-law saying. “You are destroying my son.”
Although Mrs. Charlot loved her husband deeply, she granted him a divorce, she said, so that he could get his life back.
Mrs Charlot’s third marriage, to her second millionaire, ended in divorce, as did her fourth, to the son of a German baron, born in Mexico. He discovered that he hadn’t bothered to tell her that he had been married to two women before and that he had never bothered to divorce her.
Mrs. Charlot leaves no close relatives.
In subsequent years, Mrs. Charlot, whose death was confirmed by her friend Carol Hopkins, produced contemporary interpretations of traditional Mexican wedding dresses. She had lived in Tepoztlán, south of Mexico City, since the 1980s.
By the height of the 1960s, the miniskirt had put an end to the poodle. But before that happened, a young woman was captured in a press photograph that betrayed the scope of Ms. Charlot’s work.
The time was 1951 and the place was Ottawa, where the woman was participating in a home inspection of the governor general of Canada. At 25, she had never seen a tripper and was privately taught her mysteries before the dancing began.
The woman, attracted by a steel blue full skirt of Mrs Charlot applied with hearts, flowering branches and stylized figures of Romeo and Juliet, she performed admirably, according to the news.
Her name was Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, and from the following year she would be known as Queen Elizabeth II.
Alex Traub contributed to the reporting.
