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Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon

Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon
LadyDuffGordon-1919.jpg
Lucile,
photographed by Arnold Genthe
Born Lucy Christiana Sutherland
13 June 1863
London, England
Died 20 April 1935(1935-04-20) (aged 71)
Putney, London, England
Nationality English
Occupation Fashion designer
Labels Lucile Ltd.

Lucy Christiana, Lady Duff-Gordon (née Sutherland) (13 June 1863 – 20 April 1935) was a leading British fashion designer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who worked under the professional name of "Lucile".

The first British-based designer to achieve international acclaim, Lucy Duff-Gordon was a widely acknowledged innovator in couture styles as well as in fashion industry public relations. Apart from originating the "mannequin parade", a precursor to the modern fashion show, and training the first professional models, she launched liberating slit skirts and low necklines, popularized less restrictive corsets, and promoted alluring and pared-down lingerie.

Opening branches of her London house, Lucile Ltd, in Chicago, New York City, and Paris, her business became the first global couture brand, dressing a trend-setting clientele of royalty, nobility, and stage and film personalities. Duff-Gordon is also remembered as a survivor of the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912, and as the losing party in the precedent-setting 1917 contract law case of Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, in which Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo wrote the opinion for New York's highest court, the New York Court of Appeals.

The daughter of civil engineer Douglas Sutherland (1838–1865) and his Anglo-French-Canadian wife Elinor Saunders (1841–1937), 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 (d. 1889), 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.


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