This article is part of Overlookeda series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported in The Times.
For many fashionable women in the mid-20th century, no hat was worth wearing unless it was made by Otto Lucas.
Lucas, a London-based milliner, designed chic turbans, berets and cloches, often made of luxurious velvet and silk and decorated with flowers or feathers.
His designs made the covers of magazines like British Vogue and on the heads of clients, reportedly including actresses Greta Garbo and Gene Tierney, as well as the Duchesses of Windsor and Kent.
The name Otto Lucas was ubiquitous in England. At the height of his success, he sold thousands of hats every year around the world.
‘He must have been the most famous hatter of the 1960s’ 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 leading name in the fashion industry, he struggled as a German-born Jew in Britain during World War II, and as a gay man in a country that criminalized homosexual acts. He led a kind of double life, flaunting a glamorous lifestyle to the outside world, while privately seeking safe havens for gay people.
Otto Lucas was born on July 9, 1903 in Mülheim, Germany, the son of Jacob and Dina Lucas, both German Jews. His father was a horse dealer. He had a sister, Erna.
Details about Lucas’s early life are scarce, but scholar Anna Nyburg wrote 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 possibly earlier worked in Berlin. He moved to London around 1932. Three years later he ran a successful store in New Bond Street, known for its luxury boutiques.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, 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 murdered there shortly afterwards. Lucas was interned in a camp on the Isle of Man from June to September 1940.
When the war ended, Lucas’s international reputation exploded. By 1946 he was exporting shipments of hats to Australia, and he began traveling to exhibit them, gaining 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 on a trip to the United States in 1948, The New York Times described some of his creations: “a black taffeta, worn flat on the head and tied at the back with bows”; a hat made of “green and pink striped satin” with “roses nestled 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?” asked the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1953, adding, “There is no doubt about it, his hats have elegance, but with a disarming charm.”
Lucas described his method succinctly The Sydney Morning Herald in 1955: “I consider hat making to be an art and a science.”
In 1961, Lucas became a naturalized citizen of England, where he supplied hats to luxury department stores such as Harrods and Fortnum & Mason, started a fast-selling line of more affordable hats called Otto Lucas Junior and showed his creations at London Fashion Week. .
“Hats are my crazy extravagance, I buy several a year from Otto Lucas,” Beryl Maudling, a former actress and dancer, told The Daily Herald in 1963. “But when you’re as small as I am, an important hat is essential – gives you ‘presence’.”
Lucas designed special editions of hats in honor of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, giving them names like “Tiara,” “Dream Princess” and “Crown Jewels,” and he created lines for female athletes during the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome and the 1964 Olympic Games. Summer Games in Tokyo.
In the 1950s he employed more than a hundred employees, including three designers who were usually hired from Paris.
Carole Cornish, a graphic designer who made hats for Lucas in 1964 and 1965, said in an interview that he was “very smart” and “not unpleasant” but that he could be picky. “Fights would arise if the designer wanted to do something and he didn’t,” she said.
But, Cornish says, it can be exciting to work in his business, especially when the royal family visits the showroom. “We felt quite privileged to be working for such a powerful man,” she said.
It all translated into huge financial success. Rolf Andersen, Lucas’ partner for about a decade, told Nyburg in an interview for “The Clothes on Our Backs” that Lucas wore tailor-made suits, drank a lot of champagne and was driven around in a Rolls-Royce. The couple lived in an upscale area of London with two poodles, Olga and Whiskey, and had a country house in Kent, in southeast England, with acres of lush gardens.
Although homosexual acts were criminalized in Britain until 1967, Cornish said she and others who worked for Lucas knew he was gay. Lucas was also a mainstay of the Colony Room Club, a meeting place for artists and bohemians in London’s Soho district that welcomed gay men and lesbians, and he was a close friend of its owner, Muriel Belcher, a lesbian who was quite open about her own sexuality.
Lucas died in a plane crash in Belgium on October 2, 1971, while en route from London to Salzburg, Austria. All 55 passengers and eight crew members were killed. according to news reportsafter a mechanical failure. Lucas turned 68.
A report in a British newspaper announced that Lucas’ assets, totaling about 150,000 pounds after taxes (about $2.3 million in today’s dollars), had been left to Andersen. Its business was liquidated in 1972.
By some estimates, Lucas sold 55,000 hats in his last year as an entrepreneur, says Lucie Whitmore, the chief curator of “Fashion City,” an exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands about Jewish contributions to British fashion, including a chapter on Lucas. His creations can still be found on the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and sometimes they appear on eBay. But for the most part, Whitmore said, after his death, “his name disappears very quickly.”
Lucas may not have been surprised by this.
“Fashion moves with the times,” he said The Morgenherald from 1960. “It is vibrant, essential and constantly changing. We hatters are not concerned about what happened yesterday.”
