The designer who created the iconic poodle skirt

Juli Lynne Charlot 1922–2024

It was December 1947 and Juli Lynne Charlot had a problem: She’d been invited to a Hollywood Christmas party and had nothing suitable to wear. With her husband jobless and money tight, the former singer figured she’d make a dress—but she couldn’t sew. So, she took a swath of white felt and cut it into a circle, cut another circle in the center for her waist, and adorned the bottom with Christmas tree appliques. The skirt was a hit, and when she made a few more and took them to a Beverly Hills boutique they sold quickly. When she shifted the design from Christmas trees to a poodle on a leash, a trend was born: The poodle skirt swept the nation, becoming a symbol of the 1950s. “If I had known how to sew, or had the money to purchase better materials,” Charlot said, “I would have never made the circle skirt.”

Born Shirley Agin, she grew up in Los Angeles, where her father, an electrician, and her mother, an embroiderer, worked for Hollywood studios. In high school she “rubbed elbows with the likes of Judy Garland and Lana Turner,” said People, and then changed her name to pursue a career as a singer, touring military bases with the Marx Brothers during World War II. She stepped back from singing after marrying the second of four husbands, film editor Philip Charlot. Charlot’s skirt captured the zeitgeist, said The Washington Post. The whimsy of the design “seemed to celebrate the postwar optimism” in the U.S. Her skirts, and those by her “many imitators”—including teenagers who made their own at home—began to feature not just dogs but also other animals, including horses, giraffes, elephants. All were known, though, as poodle skirts. They sold briskly at about $35 apiece, the equivalent of $400 today.

With so much fabric that “flared prettily when the wearer twirled,” the skirts were perfect for sock hops, said The New York Times. But they went out of fashion in the 1960s, and Charlot moved to Mexico, where she remained until her death. She made another foray into fashion in the 1980s with modern interpretations of Mexican wedding dresses. But it’s her poodle skirts that are still collector’s items. “They are to wear at dull parties,” she once said. “If they don’t brighten up the party, the party is impossible.”