Lucien Lelong

Lelong with Natalia Paley

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Lucien Lelong (born October 11, 1889 in Paris , † May 11, 1958 ) was a French couturier .

Lelong's parents owned a small fashion house in Paris. In 1909 he got into the business, radically redesigned the salon and worked on his first collection, the presentation of which was prevented by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Lelong was drafted, served as an intelligence officer, and was injured in the face by shrapnel. In 1923 he opened a fashion house on the Place de la Madeleine in Paris. He did not design himself, but employed young, talented designers, including Christian Dior between 1942 and 1945 and Pierre Balmain from 1939 to 1945 . His business success was considerable; in 1926 he had 1,200 employees. From 1928 Lelong resided at 16 avenue Malignon near the Champs-Élysées .

On August 16, 1927, he married the Russian Princess Natalia Pawlowna Paley , who subsequently also worked as a mannequin for the Lelong company. The marriage ended in divorce on May 24, 1937 after becoming pregnant by the bisexual writer Jean Cocteau .

From 1937 to 1945 Lelong was President of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture Parisienne . During the Second World War under German occupation. It was thanks to him that the center of haute couture was not moved to Berlin or Vienna as planned by the occupiers, but remained in Paris. On July 20, 1940, five Nazi officers appeared in the office of the Chambre Syndicale for an "inspection". They reappeared five days later and confiscated archives and records. Lelong negotiated with the occupying power and succeeded in convincing the Germans that Parisian fashion with the entire environment of numerous small, highly specialized craft businesses, whose functioning was based on knowledge acquired over decades, was not simply packed in a train and shipped to Berlin could be. The archive was returned and not only that, Lelong succeeded in largely bypassing the wartime fabric rationing and also in reducing the rate of forced labor in the fashion industry from the planned 80% to 5%.

So it came about that, while the editors of the fashion magazines in London and New York were forced to support the economy and durability oriented fashion propagated by the governments in Great Britain and the USA, in Paris, thanks to Lelong, the remaining fashion houses from barely impaired during the war.

In 1948, Lelong had to retire from the shops for health reasons. He closed the fashion studio and moved to Biarritz . In 1958 he died of a heart attack. The perfume brand he founded exists to this day. Perfumes launched by Lelong include N (1932), Indiscret (1936), Sirocco (1947), Lelong pour Femme (1998), Opening Night (1999) and Orgueil (2002).

literature

• Jacqueline Demornex: Lucien Lelong. Thames & Hudson, London & New York 2008, ISBN 978-0-500-51435-1 .
• Ingrid Loschek : Reclam's fashion and costume lexicon. 5th edition Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-15-010577-3 , pp. 550f.
• Esmeralda de Rethy, Jean-Louis Perreau: Christian Dior: the early years, 1947-1957. Vendome Press, New York 2001, ISBN 978-0-86565-249-1 .
• Emily Banis Stoehrer: Glamor by design. Design drawings from the house of Lucien Lelong. Couturier, 16, avenue Matignon, Paris 1925-1948. Museum of Fine Arts , Boston 2013, ISBN 978-0-9839573-9-3
• Lucien Lelong, couturier 1918-1948. Fashion Institute of Technology, New York 2006.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ NJ Stevenson: The History of Fashion. Styles, trends and stars. Haupt, Bern et al. 2011, p. 134.

Web links

Commons : Lucien Lelong  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Lucien Lelong: the man who saved Paris , Linda Grant in The Telegraph , November 21, 2008, accessed May 12, 2014