Lilly Pulitzer

Lilly Pulitzer is the American socialite and fashion designer (1931–2013), born Lillian McKim, who founded Lilly Pulitzer, Inc. in Palm Beach and turned bright, colorful floral prints into an American resort uniform — earning her the name 'Queen of Prep'. This page is the front door to that record in this guide: from here, the series opens out into the collections filed season by season, the fall and spring strands taken separately, the fashion week and runway coverage of the shows themselves, the running news record, and the profiles page where the life and career behind the clothes are set out in full.

Lillian Pulitzer Rousseau, better known as Lilly Pulitzer, was born on November 10, 1931. In Palm Beach she ran a juice stand selling citrus from her husband Peter Pulitzer's groves, and had simple shift dresses made in bright printed cotton so the juice stains would not show; customers wanted the dresses as much as the juice, Jacqueline Kennedy was photographed wearing one, and Lilly Pulitzer, Inc. — founded in 1959 — grew from that printed shift into a complete resort wardrobe. She died on April 7, 2013. The search routes in the references run Lilly Pulitzer news, photo and video searches, and the designer's official website is linked there as well. Readers who already know the strand they want — a season, a show, the biography — can go straight to it from the series links on this page.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.

One Designer, Many Views

A designer of this standing cannot be covered honestly in a single summary, because the work operates on several levels at once. There is the garment level — print as camouflage turned to celebration — bold floral patterns carried on simple, comfortable shapes made for a resort day — which the collections and product pages examine piece by piece. There is the show level, where each season's argument is made in sequence under lights, which the runway and fashion week pages follow. And there is the biographical level, the training, accidents and decisions that explain why the clothes look the way they do, which belongs to the profiles page. This main page exists to keep those levels connected rather than to repeat any one of them.

The signature that runs through every level is bright, colorful floral and tropical prints — printed shift dresses, resort tunics and cheerful separates in pink, green, turquoise and yellow. It is recognizable in a single photograph and in a full season alike, which is precisely why the record rewards being read whole: the same hand appears in the earliest work and in the most recent collections, and the series is arranged so a reader can trace it — from the main routes here, into a season, onto the runway, and back to the life on the profiles page.

How to Use This Guide

Start here if you are arriving fresh: the links above the references divide the record by kind — news for the current story, photos and videos for the visual record, the named pages for the filed one. The Photos section gathers the imagery carried with this page, and the reference searches are kept current by the search engines themselves, so a story published this week is reachable from a page whose filed record may end earlier. Dates matter for the same reason: a photograph from an early season can illustrate coverage of any later one, and the season pages are the corrective.

For the background the headlines assume, the profiles page is the essential companion — it carries the dates, places and turning points in order. For the work itself, the collections page files the seasons, and the fall and spring pages separate the two registers of resort color restated in every season. Read together, the pages in this series give a complete working picture of Lilly Pulitzer: the life, the clothes, the shows and the coverage, each in its own place.

Photos