Lucy Duff-Gordon and her husband Sir Cosmo in 1912.
Lucy Christiana, Lady Duff-Gordon (née Sutherland; 13 June 1863 – 20 April 1935) was a leading British fashion designer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who worked under the professional name Lucile.
Biography[]
The daughter of civil engineer Douglas Sutherland (1838–1865) and his Anglo-French-Canadian wife Elinor Saunders (1841–1937), Lucy Christiana Sutherland was born in London, England, and raised in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, after her father's death from typhoid fever.
In 1884, Lucy married for the first time, to James Stuart Wallace, with whom she had a child, Esme (1885–1973; later wife of the 2nd Earl of Halsbury and mother of Tony Giffard, 3rd Earl of Halsbury). Wallace was an alcoholic and regularly unfaithful, and Lucy sought consolation in love affairs, including a long relationship with the famous surgeon Sir Morell Mackenzie. The Wallaces separated circa 1890, and Lucy started divorce proceedings in 1893; the divorce was finalized in 1895. In 1900, Lucy Sutherland Wallace married a Scottish baronet, landowner and sportsman Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon.
The first British-based designer to achieve international acclaim, Lucy Duff-Gordon was a widely acknowledged innovator in couture styles as well as in fashion industry public relations. In addition to originating the "mannequin parade", a precursor to the modern fashion show, and training the first professional models, she launched slit skirts and low necklines, popularized less restrictive corsets, and promoted alluring and pared-down lingerie.
Opening branches of her London house, Lucile Ltd, in Chicago, New York City, and Paris, her business became the first global couture brand, dressing a trend-setting clientele of royalty, nobility, and stage and film personalities. Duff-Gordon is also remembered as a survivor of the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912, and as the losing party in the precedent-setting 1917 contract law case of Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, in which Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo wrote the opinion for New York's highest court, the New York Court of Appeals, upholding a contract between Duff-Gordon and her advertising agent that assigned the agent the sole right to market her name. It was the first case of its kind, clothes labelled and sold at a lowered cost in a cheaper market under an expensive "brand name".
Lady Duff-Gordon died of breast cancer, complicated by pneumonia, in a Putney, London nursing home in 1935, aged 71. The date of her death, 20 April, was the fourth anniversary of her husband's death.