Lilly Pulitzer was the queen of colorful and playful, perhaps a bit childish, style in Palm Beach, Florida. Her shift dresses marked an era, and from 1958, the year she founded her brand, to the present day they continue to be beloved in the favorite vacation spots of the elite. The very ones in which the plot of Sirens, the Netflix TV series directed by Molly Smith Metzler and starring Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon, Milly Alcock and Meghann Fahy.
The plot is as mysterious as it is fascinating, and everything is extremely polished, starting with the wardrobe of the main characters. Who, unlike Devon, the black sheep of the group played by Fahy, wear colorful, patterned mini-dresses that look like something out of a dollhouse. “I spent a summer in Martha’s Vineyard and I’ve since spent some summers in Nantucket,” Metzler told Variety. “My best friend has a house there, and it’s for real. Lilly Pulitzer is for real. They all have it on in Nantucket. Then there’s the Nantucket reds, the salmon color pants. The first time you see it, you’re like, ‘Where am I?’ It’s so bright. It’s sort of like, if you’ve been there, you’re in on the joke, you know the pants to buy.”
Lilly Pulitzer, Bohemian Heiress and Rebel
In 1958, newly married and in her early twenties, Pulitzer moved to Palm Beach with her toddler daughter and her husband, a descendant of the family that created the prestigious literary prize and wealthy citrus orchard owner. Brilliant and a maverick, unable to sit idly by and simply enjoy the family’s immense fortune, she sets up a small fruit store where she also served freshly squeezed juices and ended up staining herself all the time. So she decides to create a dress with a print that can disguise the splashes with the help of artist and textile designer Suzie Zuzek, who created the intricate patterns that became the brand’s signature.
The New York-origin socialite is a decidedly atypical character for the high society to which she belongs. Liberal and progressive, she likes to enjoy life, walk barefoot and has a style all her own. “The first designs I made in the beginning were made from fabrics I bought in cheap stores in West Palm Beach. When they debuted, they were a real shock to everyone: they thought they would last one season and then disappear, but the opposite happened,” she recounted in 1971 in an interview given to the Palm Beach Post.
Pulitzer’s colorful minidresses were also unique because they were totally antithetical to everything else that was fashionable at the time. In the late 1950s, in fact, women wore corsets and shaping lingerie in order to fit into the clothes they wore. The garments created by Pulitzer, in contrast, slipped on easily and were extremely comfortable.
