What’s a fine Jewish viscountess to do when she has a title but no money, an invitation to a party but no clothes, and a pair of scissors but no sewing skills?
Invents the poodle skirt, of course.
This, quite by accident, Juli Lynne Charlot did in late 1947, creating a totem of midcentury material culture as evocative as the saddle shoe, the hula-hoop, and the pink plastic lawn flamingo.
Ms. Charlot, a native New Yorker who died at her home in Tepoztlán, Mexico, on Sunday at 101, was a Hollywood singer before her marriage in the mid-1940s to a viscount, or British nobleman. Fashion-conscious but desperate for a needle, she accidentally stumbled upon a pattern for a striking skirt that involved no sewing: Take a large strip of solid-colored felt, cut it into an extended circle, decorate it with vivid appliqué figures in contrasting colors, cut a hole in the center and go inside.
The result, the embellished circle skirt, was ubiquitous throughout the 1950s, bought in droves by women and, in particular, teenage girls. With its voluminous fabric that flared out beautifully when the wearer twirled, it was the best thing about a sock.
Over the years, the circle skirts of Ms. Charlot and her many imitators have been adorned with a range of figurative applications, often including small visual narratives. But since the most popular incarnation of the garment bore images of poodles, all these skirts became generically known as poodle skirts.
“When I was a teenager, every girl in the entire Western world wore a poodle skirt,” humorist Erma Bobeck wrote in a 1984 column. She went on to define it as “a skirt with enough fabric to slide down New Jersey with a big poodle applied to it.’
Born literally of post-war abundance—the fabric was no longer in short supply—the poodle skirt seamlessly merged with 1950s youth culture, an ensemble of cheerful rags that seemed to herald a carefree era. Never mind the Cold War, the skirt seemed to say: We’ll rock around the clock.
In later years, the poodle skirt became visual shorthand for the entire decade. Even now, a production of “Grease” or “Bye Bye Birdie” can hardly be staged without evidence.
The daughter of Phillip and Betty (Cohen) Agin, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Ms. Charlot 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, worked in a Hollywood studio.
“It was easier to be poor in a favorable climate,” Ms. Charlot said in 2017, aged 94, in an interview for this obituary that fluctuated during her singing career (“I still have a voice, by the way”). her improbable stage appearances with the Marx Brothers (“I was very beautiful then”). her penchant for marriage and romance (“I’ve always been in love 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. Possessing a fine soprano voice, she began taking voice lessons at 13, determined to become an opera singer. “I was going to be Mozart’s greatest exponent,” he said.
Believing that Shirley was not an appropriate 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 the Xavier Cugat Orchestra. During World War II he appeared with the Marx Brothers on a tour of state military bases.
Throughout the years of the show, she designed her own wardrobe. Because she had refused to learn to sew (“I didn’t want to be a curmudgeon, like my mother,” she said), she hired a seamstress to realize her designs on fabric.
Ms. Charlo had no shortage of “celebrity admirers,” she said, including Harold Lloyd, Gary Cooper and Isaac Stern, the violinist.
He was married four times, “to two millionaires, a royal earl and a son of a” – and here he stopped for dramatic effect – “baron”.
The first marriage, to the first millionaire, “didn’t really count,” Ms. Charlot said. They broke up after three days.
Immediately after the war, she fled to Las Vegas with Philip Charlot, an officer in the British Royal Navy. The son of a French father and an English mother, he was also, he learned only later, a viscount.
At his request, she gave up her career, settling into life as a stay-at-home viscountess. Her husband found work as a Hollywood film editor.
In December 1947, she was invited to a Hollywood Christmas party. She had nothing suitable to wear and no money: Her husband had recently lost his job.
A fairy godmother intervened in the person of Madame Charlot’s mother, who until then had a small children’s clothing factory. She handed her daughter a huge sheet of white felt.
Out came the scissors and before long, Mrs. Charlot was in the center of a white circle skirt.
“I worked the hole with my brother’s transparency rule: C = 2πr,” she said in 2017. She could hand stitch well enough to lay out green felt Christmas trees in the background.
“My mother had a cigar box full of little tchotchkes that she used in her work,” he said. “These went on the Christmas trees as ornaments.”
The skirt was a “huge hit” at the party, she recalls.
She made several similar skirts and took them to a Beverly Hills boutique. They sold out.
After the holidays, the store asked for a non-seasonal plan. He created a tableau of dachshunds chasing each other around the skirt. Once the dachshunds were sold, the store suggested she turn her attention to poodles. French poodles were très chic at the time and many customers owned them.
The poodles beat the dachshunds.
Before long, Mrs. Charlot had a poodle skirt factory. She made skirts decorated with images of frogs and lilies, scenes from the streets of Paris, galloping racehorses, flowers in waterfalls and champagne glasses and pink elephants, along with blouses, dresses, hats and bags.
In the early 1950s, her skirts sold for about $35 apiece—about $400 in today’s money.
Because Mrs. Charlot’s business skills were, on the whole, on a par with her sewing, her factory collapsed at first. “Mother pulled out her diamond ring three weeks in a row to help me meet payroll,” he told the United Press News Service in 1953.
But with the help of an investor—and orders from exclusive department stores including Bullock’s Wilshire in Los Angeles, Neiman Marcus in Dallas and Bergdorf Goodman in New York—her future was assured.
Today, Madame Charlot’s skirts are prized by vintage clothing collectors and can sell for several hundred dollars each.
Madame Charlot’s marriage to her biscuit did not last. At the height of her success as a designer, she was invited to tea by his mother. “The more successful you become, the less successful he becomes,” her mother-in-law recalls. “You are ruining my son.”
Although Mrs. Charlot loved her husband very much, she gave him a divorce, she said, so he could get his life back together.
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 had no trouble telling her, he discovered, that he had been married to two women before and had never bothered to divorce.
Mrs. Charlot leaves no immediate family.
In later years, Ms Charlot, whose death was confirmed by her friend Carol Hopkins, made modern variations of traditional Mexican wedding dresses. He lived in Tepoztlán, south of Mexico City, since the 1980s.
At the height of the Swinging Sixties, the miniskirt had paid off. But before that happened, a young woman was captured in a press photo that betrayed the scope of Ms. Charlot’s work.
The time was 1951, and the place was Ottawa, where the woman attended a conflict at the home of the governor general of Canada. At 25, she had never seen a hoedown and was privately tutored in its mysteries before the dance began.
The woman, dressed in a steel blue circle skirt by Ms. Charlot appliquéd with hearts, blossoming branches and stylized figures of Romeo and Juliet, was famously acquitted, according to news reports.
Her name was Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor and she would be known from the following year as Queen Elizabeth II.
Alex Traub contributed to the report.
