Lilly Pulitzer, who has died aged 81, was the creator of the Lilly, a perfect, simple, cotton frock that has been a uniform for sunny pleasure in the US for more than 50 years. She generated a still-thriving fashion business, despite having no interest in fashion and no need for money.
She was born Lillian Lee McKim in Roslyn, New York. Her father was rich, her mother a Standard Oil heiress. Their money was so old that the family – Lilly had two sisters – spent it without pretension, Lilly's chief childhood happiness being summer at the beach. She dropped out of college and, on a 1952 holiday in Palm Beach, Florida, met Herbert "Peter'' Pulitzer, an owner of hotels and citrus groves – and grandson of the publisher Joseph Pulitzer. They married, started a family (with three children plus Lilly's pet monkey) and became, unusually, Palm Beach residents not just over balmy winters but through the summer too.
After Lilly collapsed in 1957 with depression, a suggested remedy was work. All she could think to do was market gift boxes of Peter's fruit and set up a juice stand on a smart central avenue. It sounds like a charity stunt, but it was a real venture, stained with sticky pulped citrus. Helped by a friend, Laura Robbins Clark (previously a fashion editor on Harper's Bazaar), Lilly advanced to a shop.
They had local seamstresses sew them dresses of cheap, bright, printed cotton to wear while juicing. These were basic – short, collarless, vestigially shaped, with few seams. The crucial decision was to bypass the waist. Dresses since the early 1930s had been cut and seamed to emphasise a small waistline, and postwar waists were constricted by girdles. Lilly and Laura rejected decades of associating femininity and sophistication with a waist seam and instead returned to an ancient garment, the unstructured shift.
Their customers wanted what they were wearing, so they had their dressmakers run up more from remnants, with a solid cotton lining that absolved the garment of sleaziness and meant it could be worn with little, or nothing, underneath. When Laura, Lilly and a pilot were stranded on a plane downed in the sea, Laura shed her shift and waved it to hitch a lift from a passing helicopter.
The dresses sold for $22 in 1959. "These marvellous women covered with jewels were coming in to buy these little rags,'' said Laura, who decided the company should take Lilly's immediately recognised married name. Remnants were hardly a viable longterm plan, so they commissioned hand-screened prints from a local firm. That was the other crucial choice – since the dresses were mere canvases, they couldn't be blank. Lilly loved fruity colour: Mexican pink, Caribbean orange, juicy lime green. She got her kicks from coming up with wild print ideas. Emilio Pucci was designing superlative prints at the time, but he would never have contemplated aubergines dancing the frug across a shift. Lilly prints anticipated by a decade the new graphic world of T-shirts.
Laura's connections brought publicity and department store orders: Lilly's personal connections were even better – the vacationing Kennedy women, plus their maids, became unpaid brand ambassadors, wearing Lillies (many of them Christmas presents from the president). The dresses were the uniform of Wasp women off-duty from their wealth, and Lilly's old boarding-school friend Jackie Kennedy was photographed in one printed with a design meant for kitchen curtains.
Lilly, priestess of Palm Beach ("It was like a weird cult,'' she said of the island, where she dressed almost all the women), then allowed friends to open her shops in other resorts. Asked by garment trade professionals when she would show her winter collection, she answered: "It's always summer somewhere.''
The business flourished, adding ranges for men and children, made in her Miami factory, faltering only when Lilly attempted the tailored office wear of the 1980s (in beige, no frugging veg); she restructured, went into chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1984, and paid off her creditors before retreating into private life. Fans collected vintage pieces as if each dress could remember its pursuit of happiness, and in 1994 a licensing company, Sugartown Worldwide, made a deal to revive the label, giving Lilly veto over any design. She had renounced Lillies – "We don't make for dumpies and plumpies'' – and settled for shirts printed with wild florals. The label was sold on in 2010, more successful than ever.
Lilly divorced her first husband in 1969 without warning (save naming her line of men's nightshirts "Sneaky Petes") and later that year married Enrique Rousseau, a charismatic Cuban exile. Rousseau died in 1993. Her children, Liza, Minnie and Peter, survive her.
