Juli Lynne Charlot, creator of the poodle skirt, dies at age 101

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 scissors but no sewing skills?

Invent the poodle skirt, of course.

That, quite coincidentally, is what Juli Lynne Charlot did in late 1947, creating a totem of 1940s material culture as evocative as the saddle shoe, the hula hoop, and the pink plastic lawn flamingo.

Ms. Charlot, a New York native who died Sunday at her home in Tepoztlán, Mexico, at the age of 101, was a Hollywood singer before her marriage in the mid-1940s to a viscount, a British nobleman. Fashion-conscious but hopeless with a needle, she was forced to stumble upon a pattern for a striking no-sew skirt: take a large strip of plain felt, cut it into an extended circle and decorate it with cheerful appliqued figures in contrasting colors, cutting a hole in it the center and insert yourself into it.

The result, the decorated circle skirt, was ubiquitous by the 1950s and was purchased en masse by women and especially adolescent girls. With its voluminous fabric that flared out beautifully as the wearer spun, it was perfect for a sock jump.

Over the years, the circle skirts of Madame Charlot and her many imitators have been decorated with a series of figurative applications, often consisting of small visual stories. But because the most popular incarnation of the garment featured images of poodles, all such skirts became commonly known 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 column. She went on to define it as “a skirt with enough fabric to cover New Jersey with a large poodle appliqued to it .’

The poodle skirt, literally born from post-war abundance – fabric was no longer scarce – fit in seamlessly with the youth culture of the 1950s, a series of cheerful rags that seemed to portend a carefree era. Never mind the Cold War, the skirt seemed to say: we’re going to rock around the clock.

In later years, the poodle skirt became a visual shorthand throughout the decade. Even today, a production of “Grease” or “Bye Bye Birdie” can hardly be mounted without one present.

Mrs. Charlot, daughter of Phillip and Betty (Cohen) Agin, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, 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, plied their trade in Hollywood studios.

“It was easier to be poor in a favorable environment,” Ms. Charlot said in 2017, at age 94, in an interview for this obituary that spanned her singing career (“I still have a voice, by the way”); her unlikely performances with the Marx Brothers (“I was very beautiful then”); her love of marriage and romance (“I was always in love with someone”); and her work as a self-taught fashion designer.

Young Shirley’s school friends included future entertainers such as the future Judy Garland, the future Ann Miller and the future Lana Turner. She had a fine soprano voice and started taking singing lessons at the age of 13, determined to become an opera singer. “I would become the greatest exponent of Mozart,” she said.

Because she did not think Shirley was 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 with Xavier Cugat’s orchestra. During the Second World War she appeared with the Marx Brothers during a tour of military bases in the United States.

During her performing years she designed her own wardrobe. Refusing to learn to sew (“I didn’t want to be a drudge like my mother,” she said), she hired a seamstress to realize her designs in fabric.

Ms. Charlot had no shortage of “famous 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 a’ – 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.

Shortly after the war, she fled to Las Vegas with Philip Charlot, an officer in the British Royal Navy. As the son of a French father and an English mother, he was also, as she learned later, a viscount.

At his request, she gave up her career and settled for a life as a stay-at-home 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 good fairy intervened in the person of Mrs. Charlot’s mother, who by then had a small children’s clothing factory. She gave her daughter a large sheet of white felt.

Out came the scissors and before long Mrs. Charlot found herself in the middle of a white circle skirt.

“I worked out the hole with my brother’s slide rule: C = 2πr,” she said in 2017. She could hand sew just well enough to appliqué green felt Christmas trees in the background.

“My mother had a cigar box full of little tchotchkes that she used at work,” she said. “They went on the 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 were sold out.

After the holidays, the store requested a non-seasonal design. She created a tableau of dachshunds one after the other around the skirt. Once the dachshunds were sold, the store proposed she turned her attention to poodles. French poodles were très chic at the time and many customers owned them.

The poodles attacked the dachshunds.

It wasn’t long before Mrs. Charlot had a poodle skirt factory. She made skirts decorated with images of frogs and water lilies, Parisian street scenes, galloping racehorses, cascading flowersAnd champagne glasses and pink elephantsalong with matching blouses, dresses, hats and handbags.

Early fiftiesher skirts sold for about $35 each – about $400 in today’s money.

Because Ms. Charlot’s business skills were, by her own account, on par with her sewing skills, her factory initially failed. “Mother put on her diamond ring for three weeks at a time to help me make payroll,” she told the United Press news service in 1953.

But with the help of an investor – and orders from high-end department stores including Bullock’s Wilshire in Los Angeles, Neiman Marcus in Dallas and Bergdorf Goodman in New York – her future was assured.

Today, Mrs. Charlot’s skirts are prized by vintage clothing 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 designer, she was called to tea by his mother. “The more successful you become, the less successful he becomes,” she remembered her mother-in-law saying. “You’re destroying my son.”

Although Mrs. Charlot loved her husband very much, she allowed him to divorce, she said, so he could get his life back.

Ms. Charlot’s third marriage, to the second millionaire, ended in divorce, as did her fourth, to the Mexican-born son of a German baron. He hadn’t bothered to tell her, she discovered, that he had previously been married to two women and had never bothered to divorce.

Mrs. Charlot leaves behind no immediate family.

In later years, Mrs. Charlot, whose death was confirmed by her friend Carol Hopkins, crafted contemporary renditions of traditional Mexican wedding dresses. She had lived in Tepoztlán, south of Mexico City, since the 1980s.

At the height of the Swinging Sixties, the miniskirt had paid for the poodle. But before that happened, a young woman was captured in a press photo that revealed the scope of Ms. Charlot’s work.

The year was 1951 and the place was Ottawa, where the woman attended a meeting at the home of the Canadian Governor General. At 25, she had never seen a hoedown and was privately tutored in its mysteries before the dancing began.

The woman, dressed in a steel blue circle skirt appliquéd by Madame Charlot with hearts, flowering branches and stylized figures of Romeo and Juliet, acquitted herself admirably, according to news reports.

Her name was Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor and she would be known as Queen Elizabeth II from the following year.

Alex Traub reporting contributed.