This article is part of Disregardeda series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, from 1851 onwards, were not reported in The Times.
For many elegant women of 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 bells, often made of luxurious velvets and silks and adorned with flowers or feathers.
Her designs appeared on the covers of magazines such as British Vogue and on the heads of clients who reportedly included actresses Greta Garbo and Gene Tierney, and the Duchesses of Windsor and Kent.
The name Otto Lucas was ubiquitous in England and at the height of his success he was selling thousands of hats each year around the world.
“He must have been the most famous hat designer of the 1960s,” Philip Somerville, Lucas’ assistant who later designed hats for Queen Elizabeth II, told The Liverpool Echo in 1984. “His name was God in the hat world.”
Yet while his keen instinct for style and trends made him a preeminent name in millinery, he struggled as a German-born Jew in World War II Britain and as a gay man in a country that criminalized homosexual acts. He lived a double life of sorts, flaunting a glamorous lifestyle to the outside world while privately seeking safe havens for queer 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 trader and 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 Revitalised the British Fashion Trade” (2020) that she trained as a dressmaker in Paris and may have worked in Berlin before moving to London around 1932. Three years later, she was running a successful shop on New Bond Street, known for its high-end boutiques.
With the outbreak of World War II, some 70,000 Germans and Austrians, many of them Jews, were classified as “enemy aliens” by the British government.
Lucas’s parents, who left Germany for the Netherlands in 1936, were deported to Auschwitz in 1943, where they were murdered shortly afterwards. Lucas was interned in a camp on the Isle of Man between June and September 1940.
Once the war ended, Lucas’s international reputation exploded. By 1946 he was exporting shipments of hats to Australia and began travelling to exhibit them, earning him international attention.
“I think of all the beautiful women” when designing hats, Lucas told UPI in 1948. “Any woman in the world could wear them.”
During a trip to the United States in 1948, The New York Times described some of her creations: “a black taffeta, worn at head height and tied with bows at the back”; a bonnet made of “green and pink striped satin” with “roses nestled on the 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 to 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 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 are as small as I am, a substantial hat is essential – it gives you ‘presence.’”
Lucas designed special edition hats to celebrate Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953, giving them names such as “Tiara”, “Princess of Dreams” and “Crown Jewels”, and created lines for female athletes during the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome and the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo.
In the 1950s, it had a staff of more than 100 people, including three designers who were usually hired in Paris.
Carole Cornish, a graphic designer who made hats for Lucas in 1964 and 1965, said in an interview that he was “very intelligent” and “not unpleasant,” but could be particular. “There would be arguments if the designer wanted to do something and didn’t do it,” she said.
But Cornish said working on his business could be exciting, particularly when royalty visited the showroom. “We felt very privileged to work for such a powerful man,” she said.
It all translated into enormous financial success. Rolf Andersen, Lucas’s partner for 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 traveled in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce. The couple lived in a posh part of London with two poodles, Olga and Whiskey, and had a country house in Kent, in southeast England, with acres and acres of splendid 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 gathering place for artists and bohemians in London’s Soho neighborhood that welcomed gays and lesbians, and was a close friend of the owner, Muriel Belcher, a lesbian who spoke quite openly 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 died, according to press reports, after a mechanical failure. Lucas was 68 years old.
A publication in a British newspaper announced that Lucas’s assets, totaling approximately 150,000 pounds after taxes (about $2.3 million today), were left in the hands of Andersen. His business was liquidated in 1972.
By some estimates, Lucas sold 55,000 hats in her final year of business, said Lucie Whitmore, chief curator of “Fashion City,” an exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands on Jewish contributions to British fashion that included a section on Lucas. Her creations can still be found at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and sometimes appear on eBay, but for the most part, Whitmore said, after her death, “her name disappears very quickly.”
Lucas may not have been surprised by this.
“Fashion moves with the times,” he told The Morning Herald in 1960. “It is vivid, vital, ever-changing. We couturiers are not concerned with anything that happened yesterday.”
