Lilly Pulitzer: Fashion Designer, Socialite Dies at 81

Lilly Pulitzer, the Palm Beach princess of prints who created an enduring fashion uniform for wealthy socialites and jet setters almost by accident, died on Sunday at her home in Florida. She was 81.


Her death was confirmed by the Lilly Pulitzer company, which provided no further details.

As the story goes, in its most romanticized version, Ms. Pulitzer’s fashion empire, famous for its tropical print shift dresses and lighthearted embrace of jarring color combinations like flamingo pink and apple green, was born out of necessity.

In 1959, after opening a juice stand among the citrus groves of Palm Beach, Ms. Pulitzer, an heiress herself who had married young into the wealthy publishing family, needed a dress that would camouflage the stains of orange and grapefruit spills. So she had one made, creating a look that proved to be so popular it would become a mark of membership for old-money families at play for more than five decades. Her vividly flowered house dresses became known, in the shorthand of the rich, simply as Lilly's. 

Of course, the story was more complicated — full of Joe De Vivie though not entirely happy at the beginning — but then the beauty of Lilly Pulitzer dresses was that they were designed to be something of a disguise. Made of plain cotton, constructed so simply that they could be recreated at home, the modestly priced dresses embodied the “Puritan ethics of balance and value,” as Laura Jacobs wrote in a Vanity Fair profile of Ms. Pulitzer in 2003. They were accessible to most, but really wearable only by the few who were so rich that they could afford to have bad taste. A mini dress of green peacocks dancing with merry seashells is not for just anyone.

At its height in the 1960s and 1970s, Lilly Pulitzer, with its popular resort wear, had sales of more than $15 million, a store on Jobs Lane in Southampton, N.Y., and clients like Jacqueline Kennedy and C. Z. Guest. Revived by a licensing company two decades ago, after Ms. Pulitzer’s retirement, the label now has annual net sales of more than $100 million with modern takes on many of her original prints.

 

“I designed collections around whatever struck my fancy ... fruits, vegetables, politics or peacocks,” Ms. Pulitzer told The Associated Press in 2009. “It was a total change of life for me, but it made people happy.”

Lillian Lee Micki was born Nov. 10, 1931, in Roslyn, N.Y., the second of three daughters of Robert and Lillian Micki. Her mother, whose maiden name was Bostwick, was an heiress to the Standard Oil fortune and left her husband for the racing enthusiast Ogden Phipps in 1937.

 Lilly and her sisters, Mimsy and Flossie, had a privileged upbringing, attending the Chapin School in New York and Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Conn. Lilly briefly attended college, but left to work as a nurse’s aide.

 While on vacation in Palm Beach, she met Herbert Pulitzer Jr., known as Peter, a dashingly handsome grandson of the publisher Joseph Pulitzer, and shocked her family by eloping with him in 1952. The young couple settled among the citrus groves of the Pulitzer estate, holding wild parties and generally ignoring whatever was expected of them from their society peers.

They had had three children within five years, when Ms. Pulitzer suddenly returned to New York suffering from what was described as a nervous collapse and a marriage, she said, that was driving her crazy.

When she finally returned to Florida, she started selling fruit from her husband’s citrus groves, and then opened a juice stand on Worth Avenue with an acquaintance from New York, Laura Robbins, a former editor at Harper’s Bazaar, partly to keep herself busy. She told People magazine in 1982: “I went crazy. I was a namby-pamby; people always made decisions for me. The doctor said I should find something to do.”