Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon

The daughter of civil engineer Douglas Sutherland and his Anglo-French-Canadian wife Elinor Saunders, Lucy Christiana Sutherland was born in London, England, and raised in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, after her father's death from typhoid fever. When her mother remarried in 1871 to the bachelor David Kennedy, Lucy moved with them and her sister, the future novelist Elinor Glyn, to Saint Helier on the Isle of Jersey. Lucy acquired her love of fashion through dressing her collection of dolls, by studying gowns worn by women in family paintings, and by later making clothes for herself and Elinor. Returning to Jersey, after a visit to relatives in England in 1875, Lucy and Elinor survived the wreck of their ship when it ran aground in a gale.

In order to support herself and her daughter after the end of her first marriage, Duff-Gordon began working as a dressmaker from home. In 1893, she opened Maison Lucile at 24 Old Burlington Street, in the heart of the fashionable West End of London, having worked for a year previously from her mother's flat at 25 Davies Street. In 1897, Duff-Gordon opened a larger shop at 17 Hanover Square, Westminster, before a further move (c. 1903–04) to 14 George Street, Oxford. In 1903, the business was incorporated as "Lucile Ltd" and the following year moved to 23 Hanover Square, where it operated for the next 20 years. Duff-Gordon was eventually bankrupted after she revealed in the American press that she was not designing much of the clothing that was attributed to her name. She spent her later years selling imported clothing and smaller collections in a succession of unsuccessful small "boutiques."

Lucile Ltd served a wealthy clientele including aristocracy, royalty, and theatre stars. The business expanded, with salons opening in New York City in 1910, Paris in 1911, and Chicago in 1915, making it the first leading couture house with full-scale branches in three countries.

Lucile was most famous for its lingerie, tea gowns, and evening wear. Its luxuriously layered and draped garments in soft fabrics of blended pastel colours, often accentuated with sprays of hand-made silk flowers, became its hallmark. However, Lucile also offered simple, smart tailored suits and daywear. The dress (photo at right) typifies the classically draped style often found in Lucile designs. Duff-Gordon originally designed the dress in Paris, for Lucile Ltd's spring 1913 collection, and later specially adapted it for London socialite Heather Firbank and other well-known clients, including actress Kitty Gordon and dancer Lydia Kyasht of the Ballets Russes. This example (photo) was worn by Miss Firbank and is preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Lucy Duff-Gordon is also widely credited with training the first professional fashion models (called mannequins) as well as staging the first runway or "catwalk" style shows. These affairs were theatrically inspired, invitation-only, tea-time presentations, complete with a stage, curtains, mood-setting lighting, music from a string band, souvenir gifts, and programmes.

Another innovation in the presentation of her collections was what she called her "emotional gowns." These dresses were given descriptive names, influenced by literature, history, popular culture, and her interest in the psychology and personality of her clients.

Some well-known clients, whose clothing influenced many when it appeared in early films, on stage, and in the press, included: Irene Castle, Lily Elsie, Gertie Millar, Gaby Deslys, Billie Burke, and Mary Pickford. Lucile costumed numerous theatrical productions, including the London première of Franz Lehár's operetta The Merry Widow (1907), the Ziegfeld Follies revues on Broadway (1915–21), and the D. W. Griffith silent movie Way Down East (1920). Lucile creations were also frequently featured in Pathé and Gaumont newsreels of the 1910s and '20s, and Lucy Duff-Gordon appeared in her own weekly spot in the British newsreel "Around the Town" (c. 1919–21).

Early Lucile Ltd sketches, archived at the Victoria and Albert Museum, provide evidence that in 1904 the salon employed at least one sketch artist to record Lucy Duff-Gordon's designs for in-house use. As demands grew on her time, especially in the United States during World War I, she was aided by sketch artists Robert Kalloch, Roger Bealle, Gilbert Clarke, Howard Greer, Shirley Barker, Travis Banton, and Edward Molyneux, who created ideas based on the "Lucile look". In her memoir, Lucy Duff-Gordon credited her corps of assistants for their contributions to the success of the New York branch of Lucile Ltd. Many of these assistants' drawings were published in the press and signed "Lucile", though occasionally the signature of the artist, such as Molyneux, appeared. It was general practice for couture houses to use professional artists to execute drawings of designs as they were being created, as well as of the artist's own ideas for each season's output and for individual clients. These drawings were overseen by Lucy Duff-Gordon, who often critiqued them, adding notes, instructions, dates, and sometimes her own signature or initials, indicating she approved the design.

Like many couturiers, Lucy Duff-Gordon designed principally on the human form. Her surviving personal sketchbooks indicate her limited technical ability as a sketch artist, but a skill at recording colour. Surviving Lucile Ltd sketches reveal numerous artists of varying talent levels, and these are often mis-attributed to herself. Howard Greer admitted in his autobiography that the sketches he and his colleagues executed were often confused interpretations of the Lucile style that did not match their employer's vision. Moreover, he claimed customers were not always pleased by the actual dresses created from the sketches he and the other assistants submitted.

Unprecedented for a leading couturière, Lucy Duff-Gordon promoted her collections journalistically. In addition to a weekly syndicated fashion page for the Hearst newspaper syndicate (1910–22), she wrote monthly columns for Harper's Bazaar and Good Housekeeping (1912–22). A Hearst writer ghost wrote the newspaper page after 1918, but the designer herself penned the Good Housekeeping and Harper's Bazaar features throughout their duration, although the responsibility of producing a regular piece proved difficult, and she missed several deadlines. Lucile fashions also appeared regularly in Vogue, Femina, Les Modes, L'art et la Mode, and other leading fashion magazines (1910–22). Along with Hearst publications, Lucile contributed to Vanity Fair, Dress, The Illustrated London News, The London Magazine, Pearson's Magazine, and Munsey's.

In addition to her career as a couturière, costumier, journalist, and pundit, Lucy Duff-Gordon took significant advantage of opportunities for commercial endorsement, lending her name to advertising for brassieres, perfume, shoes, and other luxury apparel and beauty items. Among the most adventurous of her licensing ventures were a two-season, lower-priced, mail-order fashion line for Sears, Roebuck & Co. (1916–17), which promoted her clothing in special de luxe catalogues, and a contract to design interiors for limousines and town cars for the Chalmers Motor Co., later Chrysler Corporation (1917).

In 1884, Lucy married for the first time, to James Stuart Wallace, with whom she had a child, Esme (later wife of the 2nd Earl of Halsbury and mother of Tony Giffard, 3rd Earl of Halsbury). Wallace was an alcoholic and regularly unfaithful, and Lucy sought consolation in love affairs, including a long relationship with the famous surgeon Sir Morell Mackenzie. The Wallaces separated circa 1890, and Lucy started divorce proceedings in 1893; the divorce was finalized in 1895. In 1900, Lucy Sutherland Wallace married a Scottish baronet, landowner, and sportsman Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon.