Fashionista whose reputation sank with the Titanic
She was the aristocratic designer feted across the world – until one fateful night...
IN the early hours of April 15, 1912, Lady Lucy Duff-Gordon awoke with a start in her firstclass cabin. ‘The lights were all out when I was awakened by a funny rumbling noise,’ she later wrote in her autobiography.
‘It seemed as if some giant hand had been playing bowls, rolling great balls.’
Lady Duff-Gordon was a passenger on the Titanic, and it was sinking. Pulling on two dressing gowns, a muff and a stylish hat, she raced to the deck where she was – or so she later told an official inquiry – ushered on to lifeboat number one with her husband, the Scots landowner Sir Cosmo, and her maid.
The boat departed the sinking ship with only 12 people on board – mostly first-class passengers and sailors – instead of the 40 it had been designed to hold. It was rumoured that Sir Cosmo had forced the crew to set sail at gunpoint.
As the lifeboat was rowed away from the world’s biggest ocean liner disaster, which would go on to claim more than 1,500 lives, Lady Duff-Gordon looked out across the water at the sinking ship and said to her maid: ‘There goes your lovely nightgown.’
It is a remark – controversial and disputed – which would follow her to her grave, through acres of negative press coverage, a major inquiry into the disaster and at least two portrayals on the silver screen: one in 1958’s A Night to Remember, the second in James Cameron’s 1997 epic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
But did Lady Duff-Gordon, who died 85 years ago in April, deserve the vitriol which came her way? Certainly, scandal and intrigue had a habit of following her around, which is perhaps why her autobiography, written in 1932, became an instant bestseller.
She was beautiful, married twice and had passionate affairs with powerful men, including the famous surgeon Sir Morell Mackenzie.
She was rarely seen in public without expensive furs and was rumoured to have boarded the Titanic with a wardrobe so lavish it would have been worth £250,000 in today’s money.
YeT Lady DuffGordon was also a highly influential fashion designer, one of the first women of the 20th century to set up a brand under her own name, Maison Lucile. Her quick eye and sharp nose for a trend made her perhaps Britain’s most renowned couturier between the end of the Victorian era and the 1920s.
She also created the first ‘mannequin parades’, a forerunner to the modern runway shows that dominate high fashion today, training up the first ever models and teaching them how to walk in a way that best suited the clothes.
Her sister was elinor Glyn, the original 1920s ‘It’ girl, and Lady Duff-Gordon’s influence over her style and fashion helped create a trend that survives today.
Born Lucy Sutherland in 1863, during her early life she moved between the UK, Canada and Jersey before marrying at only 21 years old and settling in London.
She had a daughter, esme, with her husband James Stuart Wallace, but he was both unfaithful and an alcoholic, and she found consolation in the arms of others – including surgeon Sir Morell Mackenzie, who had treated members of the German Royal family.
She started dressmaking to support herself and her daughter after her marriage collapsed. While she was limited in her drawing capabilities, she was excellent with colour and fabric, and her modern, flowing styles soon found fans among the fashion-forward ladies of the late Victorian period. Maison Lucile was born.
By the time she married Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon in 1900, Lucile was becoming one of the most fashionable names in London. Marrying into the aristocracy gave Lady DuffGordon increased cache.
Sir Cosmo was a keen fencer who had competed for Britain and came with a title: Baronet Halkin of Aberdeenshire, where his family owned land.
Lady Duff-Gordon’s transformation from dressmaker to aristocrat and couturier was complete.
Her speciality was silk. She created lingerie, luxurious nightgowns and daywear such as tea dresses. As her style evolved, she worked in daring hints of the feminine figure which made the more conservative fashion-watchers clutch at their pearls: low necklines, the occasional split in a skirt and loose corsets.
In 1909, business was booming so much in London that she set up a fashion house in New York, adding one in Chicago in 1911.
The audacious move made her Britain’s first truly international couturier, a highclass designer whose pieces could be available – for the right price of course – in ateliers on both sides of the Atlantic. She soon had London and New York society eating out her hand and clamouring to be dressed by her.
Indeed, it was business that placed her in that first-class cabin on that fateful night in the first place.
Needing to get to New York to sort out a problem with the lease on her shop, Titanic was the first ship available and she, Sir Cosmo and her maid Laura Mabel Francatelli, nicknamed ‘Franks’, boarded at Cherbourg. They chose to travel under an assumed name to spare Sir Cosmo unwanted publicity.
In her autobiography, Lady Duff-Gordon recalls: ‘Like everyone else, I was entranced by the beauty of the liner.
‘I had never dreamed of sailing in such luxury... my pretty little cabin, with its electric heater and pink curtains, delighted me.
‘everything about this lovely ship reassured me.’
She had certainly packed well for the voyage. A recently discovered inventory of her luggage found in a forgotten box in the Duff-Gordons’ solicitors offices revealed her trunks contained feather boas, tea gowns, long kid gloves, silk corsets, diamonds and pearls.
She also had three fur coats, a fox fur and seven large hats. The total value was given as £3,208 3s 6d – around £250,000 today.
On the night of April 14, after a ‘very merry’ dinner, she retired to her cabin wearing a pink, padded Japanese dressing gown and stockings, and with her curls tied up in a blue chiffon scarf. After being woken, ‘the boat stopped’, she wrote. ‘Then the frightful noise of steam escaping, and I heard people running along the deck outside my windows, but laughing and quite gay’.
She went to her husband’s cabin and woke him.
The great fencer was fast asleep and initially annoyed to have been woken. However, he was persuaded to go up to the bridge to investigate, while Lady Duff-Gordon unlocked her security box and took out a pair of diamond earrings, a diamond necklace and turquoises.
SIR Cosmo returned to the cabin shaken by what he had seen and urged his wife to dress, and to call her maid.
‘I deliberately thought I would not put my corsets on in case that if I got into the water I should not be able to swim,’ she recalled.
Sir Cosmo, meanwhile, took a pistol, a flask of brandy and several cigars, which he later handed out to the men on their lifeboat.
On deck they found chaos, as concern gave way to genuine panic and fear.
In the couple’s separate accounts they recalled that they did not elbow people out the way, but instead turned down places in two lifeboats for women and children because Lady Duff-Gordon did not want to be separated from Sir Cosmo.
They claimed that when the third lifeboat appeared, the deck was empty. The lifeboat, meanwhile, was full of clutter.
Sir Cosmo asked if the three could get in and, with only 12 aboard – five passengers and seven seamen – the crew were ordered to pull off quickly to avoid being sucked under by the sinking ship. As for the remark about the ‘lovely nightgown’? Lady DuffGordon maintained that she never said this.
The most controversial moment on that lifeboat, however, came when the crew members started lamenting that they had lost not only all their worldly possessions, but their jobs, too.
Sir Cosmo offered them £5 towards their new lives, but one crew member deliberately misinterpreted this offer, later claiming that Sir Cosmo had offered bribes to the
‘There goes your lovely nightgown, Franks’
seamen not to return to rescue drowning passengers.
The Duff-Gordons, having been rescued, arrived in New York to growing scandal.
Amid shock about the number of passengers left to perish, the newspapers dubbed lifeboat number one ‘the money boat’.
Lady Duff-Gordon and her husband took the criticism badly. In a letter to a friend – a note which sold at auction in Boston for nearly £8,000 in 2015 – she complained about the coverage, writing: ‘According to the way we’ve been treated by England on return we didn’t seem to have done the right thing in being saved at all !!!! Isn’t it disgraceful.’
Both were called to give evidence at the British Board of Trade’s inquiry into the disaster in 1912.
Lady Duff-Gordon appeared to give testimony, glamorous as ever, dressed in an enormous black veiled hat and a coat lined in purple, from her own collection.
Such a designer to society belles was she by then that it was noted by journalists in attendance that many of the well-heeled ladies in the public gallery were dressed head to toe in Lucile designs. In her testimony, Lady Duff-Gordon described the fear and horror as people scrambled for the lifeboats. ‘A few men who crowded in were turned back at the point of Captain Smith’s revolver, and several of them were felled before order was restored,’ she said. ‘I recall being pushed towards one of the boats and being helped in.’ While the inquiry ultimately supported the Duff-Gordons’ account that they had done nothing wrong, their name remained tarnished, and suspicion lingered over their behaviour on the night in question. In 2012, Sir Cosmo’s greatnephew, Sir Andrew, said he had never doubted his uncle’s story. ‘His account of that night shows beyond doubt that he acted honourably,’ he said. ‘But mud sticks and he never really recovered from the allegations made against him. He was deeply upset and quite reclusive for the rest of his life.’ Lady Duff-Gordon’s fashion house, however, went from strength to strength. She set up a store in Paris and went on to design costumes for the Ziegfeld follies. Her clients included society’s great and good, from the Queen of Spain to the Duchess of Warwick. Her dresses appeared on the silver screen in early silent movies, worn by big names of the day such as Mary Pickford and Lily Elsie.
IN 1915, Lucille was inducted into the Paris-based Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, which determines which fashion labels are eligible to be true haute couture houses. It would be a century before another British firm – Ralph & Russo, beloved of the Duchess of Sussex – received the same honour.
The end of the war, however, saw a decline in the business following a restructuring. Once again, Lady Duff-Gordon had been tainted by scandal, this time over how much of the designing she really did of her own pieces. By 1923 the company was trading without her involvement, and later collapsed.
In her later years she became a fashion writer and critic, and her autobiography, Discretions and Indiscretions, was an international bestseller. She died in a nursing home in Putney in April 1935 at the age of 71, after being diagnosed with breast cancer.
In recent years her work has been reassessed, with many fashionistas praising her forward-thinking designs. In 2005, New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology held an exhibition of her work, and in 2006 the V&A put one of her stylish suits on permanent display.
Then, in 2011, her greatgreat-granddaughter, Camilla Blois, revived the Lucile brand with a range of silk lingerie inspired by her relative.
The collection, eye-catching, risqué, and a touch scandalous, would have suited the lady herself right down to the ground.