No longer overlooked: Otto Lucas, ‘God in the hat world’

This article is part of Overlookeda series of obituaries of notable people whose deaths were not reported in The Times from 1851 onwards.

For many fashionable women in the mid-20th century, no hat was worth wearing unless it was made by Otto Lucas.

Lucas, a London hatter, designed chic turbans, berets and cloches, often made from luxurious velvet and silk and decorated with flowers or feathers.

His designs have graced the covers of magazines such as British Vogue, and the heads of clients reportedly including actresses Greta Garbo and Gene Tierney, and the Duchesses of Windsor and Kent.

The name Otto Lucas was ubiquitous in England, and at the height of his success he sold thousands of hats every year around the world.

‘He must have been the most famous hatter of the 1960s’ Philip Somervillean assistant to Lucas who later designed hats for Queen Elizabeth II, told The Liverpool Echo in 1984. “His name was God in the hat business.”

But even as his keen instinct for style and trends made him a leading name in millinery, he struggled as a German-born Jew in World War II Britain and as a gay man in a country that criminalized homosexual acts. He lived a kind of double life, presenting a glamorous lifestyle to the outside world while secretly seeking safe havens for queers.

Otto Lucas was born on July 9, 1903 in Mülheim, Germany, the son of Jacob and Dina Lucas, both German Jews. His father was a horse dealer and he had a sister, Erna.

There are few details about Lucas’s early life, but scholar Anna Nyburg wrote in The Clothes on Our Backs: How Refugees From Nazism Revitalised the British Fashion Trade (2020) that he trained as a milliner in Paris and may have worked in Berlin before moving to London around 1932. Three years later he was running a successful shop on New Bond Street, known for its chic boutiques.

At the outbreak of World War II, approximately 70,000 Germans and Austrians, many of them Jews, were classified as “enemy aliens” by the British government.

Lucas’ parents, who left Germany for the Netherlands in 1936, were deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and murdered there shortly afterwards. Lucas was interned in a camp on the Isle of Man from June to September 1940.

When the war ended, Lucas’s international reputation exploded. By 1946 he was exporting shipments of hats to Australia and began traveling to display them, gaining international attention.

“I think of all the beautiful women” when designing hats, Lucas told UPI in 1948. “Any woman in the world could wear them.”

While on a trip to the United States in 1948, The New York Times described some of his creations: “a black taffeta, worn flat on the head and fitted with bows at the back”; a shade of “green and pink striped satin” with “roses nesting on one side.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, Lucas, “Bond Street’s mad hatter,” sold 103 hats at Saks Fifth Avenue in two days.

“What makes Otto Lucas hats different?” The Philadelphia Inquirer wondered in 1953, adding, “There is no doubt about it, his hats have elegance, but also a disarming charm.”

Lucas briefly described his method The Sydney Morning Herald in 1955: “I consider hat making to be an art and a science.”

In 1961, Lucas became a naturalized citizen of England, where he supplied hats to luxury department stores such as Harrods and Fortnum & Mason, started a fast-selling line of more affordable hats called Otto Lucas Junior and showed his creations at London Fashion Week. .

“Hats are my mad extravagance, I buy several from Otto Lucas every year,” Beryl Maudling, a former actress and dancer, told The Daily Herald in 1963. “But when you’re as small as I am, a major hat is essential – it gives you ‘presence.'”

Lucas designed special editions of hats to celebrate Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953, giving them names like ‘Tiara’, ‘Dream Princess’ and ‘Crown Jewels’, and he created lines for female athletes at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome and the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo.

In the 1950s he employed more than a hundred employees, including three designers who were usually hired from Paris.

Carole Cornish, a graphic designer who made hats for Lucas in 1964 and 1965, said in an interview that he was “very smart” and “not unpleasant” but that he could be picky. “There would be fights if the designer wanted to do something and he didn’t,” she said.

But, Cornish says, it can be nerve-racking to work in his company, especially when the royals visit the showroom. “We felt quite privileged to be working for such a powerful man,” she said.

It all translated into enormous financial success. Rolf Andersen, Lucas’s partner for about a decade, told Nyburg in an interview for The Clothes on Our Backs that Lucas wore suits, drank a lot of champagne and was chauffeured around in a Rolls-Royce. The couple lived in a posh part of London with two poodles, Olga and Whisky, and had a country house in Kent, in the southeast of England, with acres of lush gardens.

Although homosexual acts were criminalized in Britain until 1967, Cornish said that she and others who worked for Lucas knew he was gay. Lucas was also a mainstay at the Colony Room Club, a gay and lesbian haunt of artists and bohemians in London’s Soho district, and was a close friend of its owner, Muriel Belcher, a lesbian who was fairly open about her own sexuality.

Lucas died in a plane crash in Belgium on October 2, 1971, while en route from London to Salzburg, Austria. All 55 passengers and eight crew members were killed. according to news reportsafter a mechanical failureLucas turned 68.

A report in a British newspaper announced that Lucas’s assets, totaling about £150,000 after taxes (about $2.3 million in today’s dollars), had been left to Andersen. His business was liquidated in 1972.

By some estimates, Lucas sold 55,000 hats in his last year as an entrepreneur, says Lucie Whitmore, the chief curator of “Fashion City,” an exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands about Jewish contributions to British fashion, including a chapter on Lucas. His creations can still be found on the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and sometimes they pop up on eBay, but for the most part, Whitmore said after his death, “his name disappears very quickly.”

Lucas may not have been surprised by this.

“Fashion moves with the times,” he said The Morgenherald from 1960. “It is alive, vital, constantly changing. We, fashion designers, are not interested in what happened yesterday.”