LBC Oxford DNB Entry Muir

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry Muir [married name Leuckert], Jean Elizabeth (1928–1995) • Fiona MacCarthy • https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/58049 • Published in print: 23 September 2004 • Published online: 23 September 2004 • This version: 06 January 2011 • Previous version Jean Elizabeth Muir (1928–1995) by Glenys Barton, 1991 courtesy of Angela Flowers Gallery, photography by Adrian Flowers Muir [married name Leuckert], Jean Elizabeth (1928–1995), dress designer, was born on 17 July 1928 at Queen Charlotte's Hospital, London, the daughter of Cyril Vernon Muir, draper's floor superintendent, and his wife, Phyllis Evelyn Coy. Later she preferred to give her birth date as 1933. She attributed her creative pragmatism and what became a legendary self-discipline to Scottish ancestry on her father's side. The understated elegance of a designer famous for her variations on the little black dress derived in part from childhood memories of visits to her great-grandmother, a 'stylish old Scots matriarch', whose imposing drawing room overlooked Regent's Park (Muir, Clothes — aesthetics — commerce, 711). Jean Muir was reticent about the details of her early life. She and her brother, Christopher, seem to have moved from London to Bedford, home of her mother's family, soon after Jean reached school age. Her parents parted when she was still young, and contemporaries at the Bedford Girls' Modern School, which she attended from the age of eleven, were aware of difficult family circumstances. The evidence suggests that she was a fee-assisted pupil at the predominantly fee-paying direct grant school. Her academic achievements were unimpressive, but she showed a precocious talent for needlework, claiming to have been able to sew, knit, and embroider by the age of six, and to have completed her first skirt at eleven. As a teenager she made all her own clothes, being too small to find ready-made garments to fit her. Her intense interests in art and in historical costume were aroused at this early stage. Muir's first job on leaving school in 1945 was as a clerk in the electoral register office of the shire hall in Bedford. The post appealed to her meticulous cast of mind. But she soon felt the counter-attraction of London and, after a short time in a solicitor's office, found congenial work in Liberty's department store, first in the stockroom, then in scarves and lingerie, graduating to sketching and designing for the model room and the new and glamorous Young Liberty department, an early emanation of the post-war youth cult with which (although Jean Muir would emphatically deny it) her early success was inextricably entwined. She then worked briefly at Jacqmar, where she met the exuberant Danish milliner Aage Tharrup. He introduced her to Jaeger where she spent the next six years as a designer of dresses, sweaters, coats, and suits, liaising with Jaeger's factory and suppliers and learning the complex disciplines of seasonal production. This experience proved invaluable when, in 1962, she established her own label, Jane and Jane, backed by the fashion house of Susan Small. Four years later, after Susan Small had been absorbed by Courtaulds, she and her husband, the German-born Harry Leuckert (b. 1928/9), whom she had married on 16 February 1955, borrowed capital to form their own company, Jean Muir Ltd, setting up their Mayfair headquarters in Bruton Street. Leuckert, the son of Friedrick August Leuckert, dentistry researcher, had trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Muir's great innovation was what she defined as 'couture ready-to-wear' (Muir, Clothes — aesthetics — commerce, 713). She set her mind on evolving clothes that had 'a couture feel', luxurious in materials and beautifully shaped, while eliminating the laborious hand-sewing and elaborate technical and social conventions of the traditional couture house. Muir was always to make clothes for private clients, but ready-to-wear Jean Muir garments were available to the general public, albeit at high prices and through carefully selected stores. These were clothes for newly mobile women, which came to define an era. Muir was a dancer manquée . Her own passionate interest in classical ballet gave her a strong sense of anatomical structure. Her favoured fabrics—the famous black jersey, wool, crêpe, cashmere, supple leathers, and suedes—responded to the shifting female body. Her fluency of line made her the natural successor to the great French female couturiers Madeleine Vionnet and Madame Grès. Among her loyal clients were the writer Antonia Fraser, the sculptor Elisabeth Frink, the painter Bridget Riley, and the actress Joanna Lumley, who was at one time a Jean Muir house model. Although the term ‘feminism’ made Muir shudder, she was designing for the emergent high-profile professional woman of the 1960s and 1970s, the social group from which she drew her friends. Muir disdainfully rejected the word ‘fashion’, aiming for gradual stylistic evolution in her clothes rather than 'the flimsy seasonal ins and outs of trends' (Muir, Clothes — aesthetics — commerce, 713). There were no shock changes of hemline in her collections. Her colour spectrum was a recurring navy, black, and grey, with only occasional contrasting bursts of colour. She described herself as a dressmaker rather than designer, seeing herself as part of a historic continuity of the craft and trade of clothes. She was a supreme technician, believing that, in making the pattern for a garment, system and accuracy were as important as they were in any engineering process. Her philosophy was rooted in decorum: she saw attention to dress as a sign of self-respect and of regard for the moral order of things. Her influence on the next generation of designers, for instance Jasper Conran, was to be profound. Muir's attitude to business was always autocratic. In 1986 the company was sold to Coats Paton, owner of Jaeger, but the liaison was unhappy and few people were surprised when Muir and her husband soon regained control. Of a turnover for Jean Muir Ltd amounting to around £3 million by the early 1990s, £1 million was accounted for by sales to the United States, Muir's second spiritual home, where her understated modern style won many accolades, including the honorary citizenship of New Orleans. Muir's diminutive figure, clad in navy blue or occasionally black, was a distinctive and, to those who did not know her, an alarming presence on the London scene. Her friend and admirer Sir Roy Strong commented that only she could attend a queen's birthday party dressed like a Neapolitan widow (The Independent , 30 May 1995). She was firm in her views, and a mistress of the put-down, delivered with the interrogatory squeak that punctuated her conversation. Only at home in Lorbottle Hall in Northumberland, a fine early nineteenth-century mansion overflowing with her acquisitions of modern art and craft, did she relax a little, wearing tartan trousers, cooking little omelettes, and playing sentimental Scottish ballads on the wind-up gramophone. Her missionary zeal for widespread appreciation of art, craft, and design was formidable. Though not a natural public speaker or committee member, she schooled herself to spread the message that investment in creativity could stem Britain's industrial decline, and she became a heroically active member of the Design Council and a trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum as well as a royal designer for industry. She was appointed CBE in 1984, and received honorary degrees from Newcastle, Ulster, and Heriot-Watt universities, and an honorary fellowship from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee. It was during her term of office as master of the faculty of royal designers that terminal cancer was diagnosed, a reversal that spurred her on to even more intensive travelling and speech-making during the months left to her. Characteristically, she kept her illness secret even from close friends. Jean Muir died in a nursing home at 20 Devonshire Place, London, on 28 May 1995 and was survived by her husband, Harry. She was buried on 6 June at the village church of St Bartholomew at Whittingham, Northumberland. A bevy of her London showroom and workshop assistants filed around the coffin dressed in Jean Muir black. The little churchyard was piled high with sprays, wreaths, and nosegays which, perfectionist unto death, she had insisted must be uniformly white. Sources • J. Muir, ‘Getting going’, The Designer (Oct 1979) o Google Preview o WorldCat • J. Muir, ‘Clothes — aesthetics — commerce’, RDI address, Royal Society of Arts, 17 Nov 1983 [in Journal of the Royal Society of Arts (Oct 1984)] • S. Menkes, ‘Head mistress with art in her craft’, The Times (7 Jan 1986) o Google Preview o WorldCat • J. Muir, ‘Quick to the cut’, Guardian Weekend (3 April 1993) o Google Preview o WorldCat • The Guardian (29 May 1995) o Google Preview o WorldCat • The Times (30 May 1995) o Google Preview o WorldCat • The Independent (30 May 1995) o Google Preview o WorldCat • personal knowledge (2004) • WWW , 1991–5 • b. cert. • m. cert. • d. cert. • private information (2004) Archives • Jean Muir Ltd, London, archive • RSA, archive • V&A, artefacts, dress collection Film • BFINA, ‘Very Jean Muir’, Channel 4, Aug 1995 Likenesses • N. Parkinson, group photograph, 1963 ( London fashion designers ), NPG; repro. in Life (18 Oct 1963) • two photographs, 1970–93, repro. in The Independent • S. Beljon, photograph, 1977, NPG • D. Remfry, watercolour, 1981, NPG • G. Barton, ceramic bust, 1991, priv. coll. [see illus.] • A. Green, oils, priv. coll. • three photographs, repro. in The Times (30 May 1995) Wealth at Death £4,131,856: probate, 1995, CGPLA Eng. & Wales .

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