This article is a part of Overlooked, a sequence of obituaries about exceptional individuals whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
To many modern ladies within the mid-Twentieth century, no hat was price carrying except it was made by Otto Lucas.
A London-based milliner, Lucas designed stylish turbans, berets and cloches, usually made out of 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 offered hundreds of hats every year around the globe.
“He should 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, informed The Liverpool Echo in 1984. “His identify was God within the hat world.”
Yet at the same time as his sharp intuition for type and developments made him a pre-eminent identify in millinery, he struggled as a German-born Jew in World War 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 looking 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.
Details about Lucas’s adolescence are scarce, however the scholar Anna Nyburg wrote in “The Clothes on Our Backs: How Refugees From Nazism Revitalised the British Fashion Trade” (2020) that he skilled as a milliner in Paris and will have labored in Berlin earlier than shifting to London round 1932. Three years later he was operating a profitable store on New Bond Street, recognized for its high-end boutiques.
With the outbreak of World War II, about 70,000 Germans and Austrians, a lot of them Jews, had been labeled as “enemy aliens” below the British authorities.
Lucas’s dad and mom, who left Germany for the Netherlands in 1936, had been deported to Auschwitz in 1943, and had been killed there quickly after. Lucas was interned at a camp on the Isle of Man from June to September of 1940.
Once the battle ended, Lucas’s worldwide popularity exploded. He was exporting shipments of hats to Australia by 1946, and started touring to showcase them, incomes worldwide consideration.
“I consider all lovely ladies” when designing hats, Lucas informed UPI in 1948. “Any lady on the earth may put on them.”
While he was on a visit to the United States in 1948, The New York Times 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 aspect.”
The Los Angeles Times reported that Lucas, “Bond Street’s mad hatter,” offered 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 magnificence however with a disarming sort of attraction.”
Lucas described his methodology 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 provided hats to high-end shops 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 Fashion Week.
“Hats are my mad extravagance, I purchase a number of a yr from Otto Lucas,” Beryl Maudling, a former actress and dancer, informed The Daily Herald in 1963. “But when you’re as small as I’m, an vital hat is important — offers you ‘presence.’”
Lucas designed particular editions of hats to have fun Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953, giving them names like “Tiara,” “Dream Princess” and “Crown Jewels,” and he created strains for feminine athletes in the course of the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome and the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo.
By the Fifties, he had a workers of greater than 100 individuals, together with three designers who had 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 could possibly be specific. “There could be arguments if the designer wished to do one thing and he didn’t,” she stated.
But, Cornish stated, working at his enterprise could possibly be thrilling, significantly when royalty visited the showroom. “We did really feel fairly privileged that we had been working for such a high-powered man,” she stated.
It all translated to monumental monetary success. Rolf Andersen, Lucas’s accomplice for about 10 years, informed Nyburg in an interview for “The Clothes 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 dwelling in Kent, in southeast England, with acres upon acres of lavish gardens.
Though gay acts had been criminalized in Britain till 1967, Cornish stated that she and others who labored for Lucas had been conscious that he was homosexual. Lucas was additionally a mainstay on the Colony Room Club, a hang-out for artists and bohemians within the Soho neighborhood of London that welcomed gays and lesbians, and he was an in depth 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 had been killed, according to news reports, after a mechanical failure. Lucas was 68.
A posting in a British newspaper introduced that Lucas’s belongings, totaling about 150,000 kilos after taxes (about $2.3 million in right now’s {dollars}), had been left to Andersen. His enterprise was liquidated in 1972.
By some estimates, Lucas offered 55,000 hats in his final yr of enterprise, stated Lucie Whitmore, the lead curator of “Fashion City,” an exhibition on the Museum of London Docklands about Jewish contributions to British style that included a bit 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 demise, “his identify disappears actually rapidly.”
Lucas may not have been shocked by this.
“Fashion goes ahead with the instances,” he informed The Morning Herald in 1960. “It is vivid, very important, ever-changing. We milliners usually are not involved with something that occurred yesterday.”
