Lilly Pulitzer jumble sale in Palm Beach

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2/28/14, "A Designer’s Palm Beach Jumble Sale," NY Times, Guy Trebay, "Lilly Pulitzer’s Estate Holds an Auction for her Eye-Popping Fashion," Palm Beach, Fla.

Ms. Pulitzer in her first shop in Palm Beach in 1962

"They came from all over, seeking a fragment of Lilly Pulitzer’s life and a souvenir of a woman they called an icon. Will Bannister and his wife, Leslie, came from Fort Worth, Tex.; Brandon and Cheryl Forbes Plunkett from Nashville; and Eva Cox from Cleveland, where she had built up a kitty especially for an auction of property from the Pulitzer estate.

“I’ve been a Lilly fan since childhood,” Ms. Cox said a week ago Saturday, referring to the designer, as much iconoclast as icon, who died last year at 81. “My aunt and my mother turned me into a little Lilly when I was a girl.”

Lilly bow tie

On a balmy morning, Ms. Cox, Mr. and Ms. Plunkett, Mr. and Mrs. Bannister and about 500 others packed into Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, a stucco bunker on a bleached-out stretch of South Dixie Highway. Inside, the auction house rooms were painted for the occasion in the raucous colors Pulitzer — untutored designer, daughter of Eastern aristocracy, nearly lifelong resident of Palm Beach, a 10-square-mile beach town where the richest Americans take their leisure — made her signature.  

They were, she liked to say, “happy” colors. And when, in the 1960s, Pulitzer stumbled upon the notion of using them to make simple shift dresses in boisterous patterns, she created in the process a multimillion-dollar business and an unexpected addition to the pop-culture lexicon.

Lilly and 2 daughters

The sale, which ultimately took in close to $700,000, was described by those who attended it as the end of an era, but which era? There are so many. There was the early 20th-century era of the architect Addison Mizner, who helped develop Palm Beach as an exclusive place in the sun for the moneyed elite."...images from top, Howell Conant, NY Times, ap.

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