Promotion Queen: Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon
For me there was a positive intoxication in taking yards of shimmering silks, laces as airy as gossamer and lengths of ribbons, delicate and rainbow-coloured, and fashioning of them garments so lovely that they might have been worn by a princess in a fairy-tale.
Lucile
Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon (1863–1935) was a pioneering English fashion designer, entrepreneur, style guru and promoter extraordinaire. Her meteoric rise to fame in the early 20th century was almost unprecedented for a female businesswoman, let alone a fashion designer. By 1915, she was the first and only couturier to have branches in London, Paris, New York and Chicago, turning the Maison Lucile into a multi-million dollar company.
But what is particularly intriguing about Lucile is how she self-consciously marketed herself. Investigating a previously unresearched archive, my work teases out how Lucile employed early promotional and advertising techniques: designing for the theatre; writing in the women’s press; managing spectacular mannequin parades; photography and interior decoration, all serving to consolidate her carefully constructed image, that of the woman designer, who designed for the emotionally complex and theatrical lady.
Hailing from New Jersey, I moved over the pond to work in fancy London town at the Fashion and Textile Museum as Assistant Curator before joining the joint V&A/RCA course in History of Design. Upon graduation I plan to continue my journey researching, writing and curating within the fashion history field.