This article is part of Misseda series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
For many fashionable women in the mid-20th century, no hat was worth wearing unless it was made by Otto Lucas.
A London-based milliner, Lucas designed elegant turbans, berets and cloches, often made of luxe velvets and silks and decorated with flowers or feathers.
Her designs have made it onto the covers of magazines such as British Vogue and among a clientele that has reportedly included actresses Greta Garbo and Gene Tierney, as well as the Duchesses of Windsor and Kent.
The name Otto Lucas is ubiquitous in England. At the height of his success, he sold thousands of hats each year around the world.
“He was probably the most famous milliner of the ’60s,” Philip Somervillean assistant to Lucas who later designed hats for Queen Elizabeth II, told The Liverpool Echo in 1984. “His name was God in the hat world.”
But even as his keen instinct for style and trends made him a household name in millinery, he struggled as a German-born Jew in World War II-era Britain, and as a gay man in a country that criminalized homosexual act. He lived something of a double life, presenting a glamorous lifestyle to the outside world while privately seeking out safe havens for strange people.
Otto Lucas was born on July 9, 1903, in Mülheim, Germany, to Jacob and Dina Lucas, both German Jews. His father was a horse trader. He has a sister, Erna.
Details about Lucas’ early life are scarce, but scholar Anna Nyburg writes in “The Clothes on Our Backs: How Refugees From Nazism Revitalized the British Fashion Trade” (2020) that he trained as a milliner in Paris and may have worked in Berlin before. moved to London in 1932. Three years later, he ran a successful store in New Bond Street, known for its high-end boutiques.
At the outbreak of World War II, approximately 70,000 Germans and Austrians, many of them Jews, were classified as “enemy aliens” under the British government.
Lucas’ parents, who left Germany for the Netherlands in 1936, were deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and killed there soon after. Lucas was imprisoned in a camp on the Isle of Man from June to September 1940.
When the war ended, Lucas’ international reputation exploded. He was exporting shipments of hats to Australia in 1946, and he began traveling to exhibit them, attracting international attention.
“I think of all the beautiful women” when designing hats, Lucas told United Press International in 1948. “Any woman in the world could wear them.”
While he was on a trip to the United States in 1948, The New York Times described some of his creations: “a black taffeta, worn level at the head and assembled with bows at the back”; a bonnet made of “green and pink striped satin” with “roses resting on one side.”
The Los Angeles Times reported that Lucas, “the mad hatter of Bond Street,” sold 103 hats in two days at Saks Fifth Avenue.
“What makes Otto Lucas’ hats different?” The Philadelphia Inquirer asked in 1953, adding, “There’s no doubt about it, his hats are elegant but with a kind of allure.”
Lucas describes his method briefly The Sydney Morning Herald in 1955: “I consider hat making both an art and a science.”
In 1961, Lucas became a naturalized citizen of England, where he supplied hats to high-end department stores such as Harrods and Fortnum & Mason, starting a fast-selling line of more affordable hats called Otto Lucas Junior and presented his creations at London Fashion Week. .
“Hats are my rage so much, I’ve been buying for years from Otto Lucas,” Beryl Maudling, a former actress and dancer, told The Daily Herald in 1963. “But when you’re as little as I am, a important hat is important – gives you ‘presence.’”
Lucas designed special edition hats to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, giving them names like “Tiara,” “Dream Princess” and “Crown Jewels,” and he created lines for female athletes at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome and the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo.
In the 1950s, he had a staff of more than 100 people, including three designers who were usually recruited from Paris.
Carole Cornish, a graphic designer who made hats for Lucas in 1964 and 1965, said in an interview that he was “very clever” and “not unpleasant,” but he could be particular. “There will be arguments if the designer wanted to do something and he didn’t,” he said.
But, Cornish said, working in his business can be exciting, especially when royalty visits the showroom. “We feel very privileged that we are working for such a powerful person,” he said.
All of this translated into massive financial success. Rolf Andersen, Lucas’ partner of about 10 years, told Nyburg in an interview for “The Clothes on Our Backs” that Lucas wore custom suits, drank a lot of Champagne and chauffeured around in a Rolls-Royce. The couple lived in a posh area of London with two poodles, Olga and Whiskey, and had a country house in Kent, in southeast England, with acres upon acres of lavish gardens.
Although homosexual acts were criminalized in Britain until 1967, Cornish said he and others who worked for Lucas knew he was gay. Lucas is also a mainstay at the Colony Room Club, an artistic and bohemian hangout in London’s Soho neighborhood that welcomes gay men and lesbians, and he is a close friend of the owner, Muriel Belcher, a homosexual who is quite open about his own sexuality.
Lucas died in a plane crash in Belgium on Oct. 2, 1971, while en route from London to Salzburg, Austria. All 55 passengers and eight crew members were killed, according to the newsafter a mechanical failure. Lucas is 68 years old.
A posting in a British newspaper announced that Lucas’s estate, worth about 150,000 pounds after taxes (about $2.3 million in today’s dollars), was left to Andersen. His business was liquidated in 1972.
By some estimates, Lucas sold 55,000 hats in his last year of business, said Lucie Whitmore, the lead curator of “Fashion City,” an exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands about Jewish contributions to British fashion that includes a section on Luke. His creations can still be found in Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and sometimes they appear on eBay. But for the most part, Whitmore said, after his death, “his name quickly disappeared.”
Maybe Lucas wasn’t surprised by this.
“Fashion moves with the times,” he said The Morning Herald in 1960. “It is vivid, important, ever-changing. We milliners are not concerned with anything that happened yesterday.”
