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Egg yolk yellow-orange velvet pillbox


style hat by Otto


Lucas Junior, for Harrods, c. 1960s


Otto Lucas


The milliner millionaire by Elly Stemerdink


The major exhibition running until 14th April 2023 at Museum of London Docklands is ‘Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners shaped global style’. The exhibition celebrates the contribution that Jewish designers have made to London’s fashion industry, helping build the UK capital’s reputation as one of the fashion centres of the world. Covering the time period running roughly from 1880 to 1980, the presentation focuses on several individual designers and includes a milliner: Otto Lucas (1903-1971).


44 | the hat magazine #99


Otto Lucas was a wholesale couture designer who, as was the case with many other designers in one category of the exhibition, emerged as an emigrant from Nazi-occupied Europe. He was born in Germany and trained in millinery in Berlin and Paris before he came to London in the early 1930s, where he opened his own hat salon in Old Cavendish Street. In the late 1930s he moved his business to Bond Street, where it would stay until his death in 1971. “Otto Lucas’s German nationality


and Jewish background caused serious upheaval in his life,” says Lucie Whitmore, Fashion Curator of the Museum of London and organiser of the exhibition. “His parents were murdered in a Nazi death camp, and


he lost contact with his sister. Upon the declaration of war in September 1939, around 70,000 Germans and Austrians living in the UK were officially classified as ‘enemy aliens’. Despite being Jewish, Otto Lucas was taken to an Isle of Man internment camp where he was held for almost three months until he managed to get out with the help of Miss Jolly, an employee who ran the business during his absence.” This terrible experience did not stop


him from setting up a very successful business and workroom in the years to come. It is noteworthy too that, as one former worker recalled later on, a lot of the women in the workroom were Jewish, most of whom were quite elderly as well. This, as Lucie explains,


All hat photos © Museum of London


Photo by Ron Stilling ANL Shutterstock


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