LILY PULITZER: THE COLOR OF MAD MONEY

An NYT Article from April, 2010

I find it interesting that my articles have been further edited, since their printing, for posterity on the internet.  This is the original title.  The one they have on there now is “Fashion With A Colorful Narrative,” those pygmy cowards. Someone got afraid that “The Color of Mad Money” might be offensive to someone. What total BS.

WES ANDERSON movies and J. D. Salinger novels both portray hyper-colorized worlds of civilized affluence. The characters are all a little too wonderful, attractive and brilliant to be believed — and they’re all a bit unstrung by their passions for sport or religion or art or each other.

Let us take this feverish color palette and apply it to casual resort-wear. Envision the mescaline rapture of a tropical morning on an infinite golf course. Mirrored beads of dew steaming into the soft turquoise heat. The loving family is educated, earnest and perfumed by chlorine and sunblock.

Lilly Pulitzer’s mother was a Standard Oil heiress; her husband was the grandson of the publishing Pulitzer. The business began as an orange juice stand in Palm Beach, Fla. (her husband owned orchards). She had her dressmaker create a batch of bright, simple shifts in prints that would hide juice stains, and a fashion sensation was born (especially when Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Ms. Pulitzer’s pal and schoolmate from Miss Porter’s, wore a Lilly dress in Life magazine.)

When I visited the newly refurbished two-story shop on Madison Avenue, I was, as usual, dressed entirely in black, which doesn’t make me self-conscious in most New York locales. But here, it was a bit like attending a children’s birthday party in a latex ski mask.

I stopped in my tracks to admire the way-outness of a rack of a frilly silk chiffon go-go halter dresses in sherbet pink and orange ($348) — very Goldie Hawn on “Laugh-In.” “She’s a Piston,” the tag said.

A girl of 12-ish stomped in with her mother and announced her need to buy her graduation dress.

“It’s so cute,” a tall blond saleswoman informed me. “Mothers and daughters come on pilgrimages. The girls save up all their own money!”

The staff members are as kind as camp counselors, which makes these fortunate tweens wholly un-self-conscious. The graduate toddled out of the dressing room holding a strapless white egg over her bustless bust, bleating: “Mom? I can’t zip it.”

A saleswoman rushed over to deliver a blast of sisterly attention.

I am not a woman who goes all woozy over infants, but in the next room, there were some baby clothes that drilled my molars full of cute: e.g., the Ruth, a miniature one-piece bathing suit with a ruffled skirt and a tiger illustration. It’s $58, pricey for a washcloth-size garment a growing baby might wear for a grand total of 4.8 hours. But irresistible, were I not Ruthless.

I was charmed by a device invented for the vintage rack: pristine Pulitzers of bygone decades (most around $200) with printed tags reading “If This Dress Could Talk,” and mini-questionnaires below, on which previous owners have handwritten the who-what-where of a memorable moment in the garment’s past. These tend to be unintentionally yet hilariously preppy:

“Summer of ’69 ... Sailing on the bay ... Mitzi and Tripp ... Sunny afternoon.”

“1975 ... Martha’s Vineyard ... My true love ... Champagne and bike riding.”

I was drawn to a Band-Aid pink-and-yolk-yellow matching kimono and pants set ($295) from, I assumed, the early ’70s. It looked exactly like something the Japanese housekeeper would have worn in  “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.”  It was an odd creation: a bright craft-smock tied under the bust for an Empire effect that said, “She’s so good with children.” Not my style, but the print had a brightening effect on my ghostly pallor, not unlike like putting several dozen buttercups under my chin.

The second floor was also home to some absolutely terrifying sport jackets for men. I imagined it was what Anita Bryant’s linen closet would have looked like after Hurricane Andrew: violent mangos, pinks and aquamarines starched into jackets of such female bedspread intensity they might cause even Ricardo Montalbán to run toward the volcano.

I asked for help from Jessica Stoller, a wry minx with turquoise eyes to match her cardigan.

“What kind of men buy these jackets?” I asked. “Mobsters? Gay guys? Gay mobsters? Game-show hosts?” She assured me the jackets were extremely popular and left my mind to wander about the ramifications of this for society at large.

Next to the jackets: equally mind-boggling men’s pants. A particular vintage pair with lurid, efflorescent hydrangeas in a double knit was impossible to accessorize with anything short of “the Full Cleveland” (a white Naugahyde belt and shoes).

I realized there was a mission afoot: Lilly Pulitzer’s unchained melody of prints — lily pads, pandas, daisies, gooseberries, oh my — are available in every cut you need to turn your relatives into the Von Trapp family singers. She wants everyone to be closer. She has a blazing urge to unify your entire clan under one big spinnaker of chintz. This is so interesting because it seems ever so slightly ... unstable. These prints aren’t as safe they look.

A framed oil painting caught my eye — dangling wisteria, painted in a lusty Fauvist style. This was an original Lilly Pulitzer. (Some artworks from which her prints are made may also be bought in the store.) The painting was surprisingly good. Ms. Pulitzer’s brush manages to express a wealth of poised, controlled craziness — or perhaps a crazed, controlled wealthiness.

A photo of Ms. Pulitzer on an upstairs wall shows her as a young brunette in a beehive hairdo, wearing a canary-yellow shift replicated in miniature on two matching children. They are standing behind the tall cast-iron bars of what I take to be their Palm Beach estate, looking a bit like inmates of a five-star sanitarium. In another photo, Ms. Pulitzer, the woman who began an empire with naught but two empires, and a juice stand, stands in her first shop, where the clothing hangs from modified gilded bird cages.

How does one become as polished, poised, cheerful and sane as Jackie O, while living a life as bent, backward and whitewater-intense as anyone else’s?

The answer might lie in matching the print on your chemise to your daughter’s pedal pushers, your son’s swim trunks, your husband’s Bermuda shorts, your father’s bow tie and your paper cocktail napkins.

Or perhaps in the original cast recording of  “Sweeney Todd”  :

My cage has many rooms/ Damask and dark

Nothing there sings/ Not even my lark

Larks never will, you know/ When they’re captive.

Teach me to be more adaptive.

1020 Madison Avenue (near 79th Street); (212) 744-4620.

HOWITZER The Lilly Pulitzer line is resurrected with a bang, just in time for a new generation of decent, fun-loving families to buy wallop-packing prints for spring at just above midrange prices (e.g., a sleeveless Lilly shift: $178).

WURLITZER The shop has a preppy, kooky cheerfulness that is a tad manic, but effective enough to make even a vampire like me want to practice my putt to the Swingle Singers.

ICH BIN EIN BERLITZER At a time when many brands seem to be tilting to please overseas customers, Ms. Pulitzer’s tastes are unapologetically American. Like Carol Brady, “Up With People” American. But they welcome anyone bold enough to wear a patchwork floral necktie under a collar of palm-green micro-gingham.

Artwork: “Mothra,” oil on canvas 2019, Cintra Wilson