Lucile, Lady Duff-Gordon drawings, 1913-1923, bulk 1913-1917

Collection context

Summary

Creators:
Duff Gordon, Lucy, Lady
Extent:
255 items (25 oversize boxes)
Language:
Materials are in English.
Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Lucile, Lady Duff-Gordon Drawings (Collection Number 624). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Background

Scope and content:

Collection consists of fashion sketches by Lucile, Lady Duff-Gordon. The color sketches are in pen or pencil with descriptions.

Biographical / historical:

Lucile, Lady Duff-Gordon, was born Lucy Christiana Sutherland in London in 1863. She began a dressmaking business after her divorce from James Stuart Wallace. The business was successful and evolved into Maison Lucile, a couture house known for Lucile's ethereal and colorful designs, as well as for its celebrity clientele. In 1900 she married Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon. In addition to her couture house, she wrote fashion columns for the Hearst papers as well as fashion magazines. Some of the commissions she worked on around the time of these sketches were for the British premiere of the Franz Lehar operetta, The merry widow (1907), for Broadway's Ziegfeld follies revues (1915-1921), and for the Hollywood film, Way down East (1920). She died on April 20, 1935, at the age of 71, of breast cancer at a nursing home in London.

Processing information:

Collections are processed to a variety of levels depending on the work necessary to make them usable, their perceived user interest and research value, availability of staff and resources, and competing priorities. Library Special Collections provides a standard level of preservation and access for all collections and, when time and resources permit, conducts more intensive processing. These materials have been arranged and described according to national and local standards and best practices.

Processed by Lorain Wang and Catherine Lee, March 2003. Additions processed by Lilace Hatayama, May 2003.

We are committed to providing ethical, inclusive, and anti-racist description of the materials we steward, and to remediating existing description of our materials that contains language that may be offensive or cause harm. We invite you to submit feedback about how our collections are described, and how they could be described more accurately, by filling out the form located on our website: Report Potentially Offensive Description in Library Special Collections.

Arrangement:

Sketches are arranged chronologically, 1913-1923, with the exception of some material added later, which date from 1916-1917 and appear at the end.

Physical / technical requirements:

PORTIONS OF THIS COLLECTION HAVE BEEN DIGITIZED. See the Existence and Location of Copies note for the link to the digitized materials.

Physical location:
Held at UCLA Library Special Collections. Advance notice is required for access to the collection. All requests to access special collections materials must be made in advance using the request button located on this page.
Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Access and use

Restrictions:

Open for research. All requests to access special collections materials must be made in advance using the request button located on this page.

Terms of access:

Property rights to the physical objects belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. All other rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.

Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Lucile, Lady Duff-Gordon Drawings (Collection Number 624). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Location of this collection:
A1713 Charles E. Young Research Library
Box 951575
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575, US
Contact:
(310) 825-4988