We interrupt this blog to bring you the sad news that Lilly Pulitzer (her full name was actually Lilly Pulitzer Rousseau) has left the party. I know – that’s the way I always put it in columns like this one; I’m really not a great one for facing that great scatter-my-ashes-at-Balenciaga place; but for Lilly Pulitzer, it’s apt. Life really was a like a great big garden party for Lilly – where the gardens were likely to be grand, expansive and flower-strewn, as they were at the mansions and beachside villas of Palm Beach, where she spent most of her adult life. She designed her first dresses for ease – for comfort, for laughs, and sheer folly. She designed (always simply, minimally) for herself and for friends first. This was clothing destined not for the runway, but the fairway; and before that just for home, the sidewalk en route to neighbors, the market, the tennis court, the beach – and tea or drinks afterwards.
Everyone knows how she started – with her orange juice stand on Worth Avenue, getting juice stains on her proper Donald Brooks or Bill Blass or whatever and having her seamstress run off a few simple shifts in cheery pastel fabrics she didn’t have to feel quite so precious about messing up. At first she just used whatever fabric she had lying around, finding amusing patterns and simple embellishments to cheer herself up. Her pals started asking for them and she had a seamstress run up a few more, then a few more after that. The juice stand became a dress stand, and the rest, as they say, is herstory.
The hobby turned herstory turned into a multi-multi-million dollar business of factories, textile design for home and apparel and stores just about everywhere. The line expanded from the sorts of shifts and frocks you might see on beaches and tennis courts and garden patios to sweaters and separates and fabrics for the home, even a limited menswear line. I don’t think any of us can forget (or perhaps forgive) some of the horrors – fish, frogs, poodles, flowers, in almost luridly fluorescent bubblegum pinks and kelly greens – among the shorts and shifts, tops and sweaters we saw coming off golf courses and tennis courts seemingly everywhere in suburbia. There was a time when everyone’s mom had at least one. But the fact remains that they were pretty serviceable dresses and separates that stood up to golf course divots and garden sod and spilled drinks (or fruit juice) and the mild wear and tear of suburban life as well and as stylishly as anything else in their wardrobes.
Even as the line expanded (inevitably) into beachwear and separates, there was something very down to earth about it – which reflected the woman at the helm. This was never going to be a line for the overly fetishized bag or boot. Pulitzer was not known as the “barefoot tycoon” for nothing. From the time of her juice/dress stand, she rarely if ever wore shoes. From the shifts to the sweaters and swimsuits, the line was about keeping it simple.
Pulitzer’s great gift (and, one should add, the gift of her textile designers and sourcers) was in finding patterns and meshing them with a particular harmony of pastels – turquoises and sea-greens (or kelly greens) with pale (or bright) yellows or orange or pinks, orchestrated in amorphous blocks or articulated with a variably fluid, broken, or bead-like black line. Before surf and skate wear, there was mom’s Lilly Pulitzer – the wardrobe for her own endless summer of beach, golf course, country club, and the never-ending trips to the supermarket. This was Lilly's legacy. And while we can all think of a few that made us cringe, there are hundreds more we could wear straight off the rack; that would hold up right beside those (far more expensive) swooshing geometric prints by Pucci we so cherished for their jet-set, avant-garde cachet.
The line endures for that reason. It’s like a joke that’s all the more enjoyable for being at one’s own expense – and finally not so much of a joke at all. The design made perfect sense; and can’t we have a bit of fun without literally or figuratively weighing the design down? Does anyone really need an excuse to have a bit of a laugh? Lilly knew how to keep it light.
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