Suffering from postpartum depression after the birth of her third child, 1950s Palm Beach socialite Lilly Pulitzer was instructed by her doctor to “find something to do”. As her family owned an orange grove, she decided to open a fruit stand. However, Pulitzer soon found that squeezing the oranges for juice made a mess of her clothes, and asked her seamstress to create some colorful shift dresses that would camouflage the stains. Her customers loved the dresses so much she began selling them at her stand. To her surprise, the loud dresses were soon outselling the oranges, and Pulitzer decided to focus on designing and selling what had become known as “Lillys”.
In 1959, Pulitzer became president of her own company, Lilly Pulitzer, Inc. The company’s main factory was in Miami, Florida, and the fabrics were produced by screen printing company Key West Hand Print Fabrics—with Pulitzer collaborating frequently with Key West’s Susan Zuzek to create eye-popping original designs. Pulitzer’s bright, comfortable, colorful clothes—worn by notable style icons such as former classmate, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and members of the Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Whitney families—quickly became very popular. After Onassis was featured in Life wearing one of Lilly’s shifts, many preppy ladies followed her lead.
Pulitzer is an outstanding example of a business chieftain whose tribe extended beyond her company. Her design collaboration with Zuzek was integral to her products, and her relationships with Onassis and others were key to marketing her brand. In an era in which stiff monochrome clothes were the norm, Pulitzer became one of America’s first lifestyle brands with her colorful boutique that played loud music and in which she could be found barefoot with her pet monkey on her shoulder. She created the “resort aesthetic” with clothing and cocktail parties that were soon embraced—far away from the yacht club set—by suburban moms everywhere.
“I want people to wear my clothes, not just for the colors, but to embrace their own spirits,” Lilly Pulitzer once said. In 2015 Target announced a collaboration with Lilly Pullitzer, and interest was so overwhelming its website crashed. But that is another story for another LIFEPATH Newsletter!
