{"id":2242,"date":"2012-11-24T15:27:42","date_gmt":"2012-11-24T23:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davina.us\/blog\/?p=2242"},"modified":"2015-08-18T23:03:10","modified_gmt":"2015-08-19T06:03:10","slug":"the-merry-widow-lucile-and-lily-elsie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davina.us\/blog\/2012\/11\/the-merry-widow-lucile-and-lily-elsie\/","title":{"rendered":"The Merry Widow, Lucile and Lily Elsie"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/h1>\n

\"\"<\/a>Over the past six weeks, I’ve been spending hours each day processing the hundreds of facts, images, and dates as I work towards publication of my book The Cloth of Egypt: All About Assiut. One of the many little “finds” in my research is this super sweet image I located in the collection at National Portrait Gallery, London. It’s rare when my research turns up an image where I know not only the person, in this case, Lily Elsie, Edwardian star of numerous musical comedies, but also, the role the costume came from, Sonia in The Merry Widow.<\/p>\n

But the highlight for me, is knowing the name of the costume designer.\u00a0 This ensemble was created by one of the first couturiers in London, Lady Duff-Gordon, who designed under the name Lucile.\u00a0\u00a0 As you look at these images, you can see that Lily, in her role as Sonia, wears an amazing assiut covered corselet with an assiut shawl draped around her hips and secured with a sparkling pair of rhinestone brooches.\u00a0 The entire ensemble captures the worldly bohemian aesthetic of the character.\u00a0 This costume is the origin point for the phrase “merry widow” used throughout the 20th century to describe a corselet.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Publicity Postcard of Lily Elsie as Sonia from The Merry Widow. Costume by Lady Duff-Gordon aka Lucile.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Merry Widow opened in 1907 had 778 performances in London’s West End. Several prominent photographers shot Lily for promotional postcards during the run of the operetta. I was lucky enough to get my own promotional postcard of Lily as Sonia from the Merry Widow, but the photographer is unknown.\u00a0 Although my image is sweet, it’s not as good at showing off the costume as the National Portrait Gallery postcard.\u00a0 But in either case, Lily’s costume is an inspiration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>

Over the past six weeks, I’ve been spending hours each day processing the hundreds of facts, images, and dates as I work towards publication of my book The Cloth of Egypt: All About Assiut. One of the many little “finds” in my research is this super sweet image I located in the collection at National […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2243,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-assiut-assuit"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.davina.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/mw73186.jpg?fit=522%2C800&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2YZtR-Aa","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davina.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davina.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davina.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davina.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davina.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2242"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.davina.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3461,"href":"https:\/\/www.davina.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2242\/revisions\/3461"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davina.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davina.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davina.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davina.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}