Sonja de Lennart

Sonja de Lennart (born 21 May 1920 in Prussia) is a European fashion designer. In 1948, she invented Capri pants.

Sonja de Lennart was born in 1920 into a multicultural family and is the daughter of an industrialist and syndicus. In her youth, she was a keen athlete in swimming and track and field. By the age of eight, de Lennart had already won many swimming competitions. In 1932, she participated in the official National Youth Competitions as an athlete in track and field running the 100 m and 1000 m sprint. She was an active member of the Classic Theater Society along with being a talented student of the Breslau State Opera ballet whose teacher was the famous dancer and ballet master, Anna Capana.

After attending business college in Breslau, her dream of becoming a fashion designer became a passion. She studied design despite her father’s extremely strong opposition and threat of disinheritance. She secretly enrolled as a student apprentice at Erich Boehm Atelier and later at Herman Palm Atelier in Berlin in which she studied the skillful trade of tailoring and the customizing of garments – from elegant hats to evening gowns – until she became a master craftsman of her trade graduating as a textile engineer. After World War II, she was entered as a member into the prestigious Handwerksrolle of the Chamber of Trade. After the political regime had destroyed the family fortune, it was de Lennart who, after World War II, restored her family financially with her fashion design trade.

In 1945, after the war, Sonja de Lennart began to produce fashion wear and opened her first boutique, Salon Sonja, in Munich. Her fashion career began with a rare but fortunate circumstance when the fashion advisor of the Taylor’s Guild, M. Ponater, allowed de Lennart to exhibit one of her first creations (a hand painted dress which she painted herself and displayed on a mannequin) in one corner of Ponater’s booth of the leading Fashion Trade Fair, Handwerksmesse, where he was displaying and selling his own fashion collection. This one and only opportunity to show her talent had customers standing in line to place orders for which she wasn’t prepared. This event turned into the beginning of the distribution of de Lennart’s creations. The demand for her designs was so overwhelming that soon after, the family began to manufacture another of her creations, imitation leather vestures, as well as three-quarter length coats that were exhibited at the Craftsman Fair and distributed nationwide becoming a bestseller.

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