Lea Gottlieb

Lea Gottlieb (born in 1918, in Sajószentpéter, Hungary; nicknamed "Lady Leah")^[1] is an Israeli swimwear fashion designer. She emigrated to Israel from Hungary after World War II, and founded the Gottex company.^[2][3][4][5]

Early life

Before World War II began, she was planning to study chemistry.^[1] During Germany's occupation of Hungary in the mid-1940s, her husband Armin was shipped to a labor camp.^[1] Gottlieb—who was Jewish—hid from the Nazis in Sajószentpéter and Budapest, moving from one hiding place to another with her daughters Miriam and Judith.^[1] At checkpoints, she hid her head in a bouquet of flowers to avoid being recognized as a Jew.^[5][6][7] Once, after seeing a Nazi with a pistol, she concealed herself and her children in a pit behind a house.^[6][8]

Fashion career; Gottex

Gottlieb and her family survived the war, and after the liberation, she and her husband ran a raincoat factory in Czechoslovakia.^[5] They emigrated to Haifa, Israel, in 1949.^[6] She recalled: "We came with nothing, without money, with nowhere to live. The first two or three years were very, very hard."^[6][7]

With money borrowed from family and friends, she and her husband opened a similar raincoat factory near Tel Aviv in 1949.^[4][7] But for months, they “saw no rain, only sunshine.”^[4][6]

As a result, in 1956 they founded Gottex, a high-fashion beachwear and swimwear company that became a leading Israeli brand outside of Israel, exporting to 80 countries.^[2][5][6][7] The company's name is a combination of "Gottlieb" and "textiles".^[9]

Gottlieb, a seamstress, began by selling her wedding ring to raise money to buy fabric.^[8][10] She borrowed a sewing machine, and sewed swimsuits in their small Jaffa apartment.^[8][10]

She was the company’s chief designer.^[6][11][12] As the company expanded, Gottlieb created attractive beach outfits for having fun at luxury beaches, by complementing swimsuits with matching tops, pareos, caftans, tunics, loose pants, small corsets, and skirts.^[13] Her collections often had dramatic and varied patterns that were inspired by and dominated by flowers, which she felt had saved her life during the Nazi occupation.^{[5][12][13][14][15][16][17]} Stitching was known to be meticulous, the prints magnificent and varied.^[13]

In 1973, when the Yom Kippur War broke out, Gottlieb canceled a foreign tour, took over operations at Gottex, and arranged fashion shows for front-line soldiers.^[2] By 1984, Gottex had sales of $40 million ($85 million in current dollar terms), and was the leading exporter of fashion swimwear to the United States, and had two-thirds of the Israeli swimwear market.^[1] Among those who wore the company's bathing suits were Diana, Princess of Wales, Spain's Queen Sofia, Elizabeth Taylor, Brooke Shields, and Nancy Kissinger.^[1] The company's 1984 strapless one-piece swimsuit became the most widely sold style in the world.^[18] In 1991, almost half of the company's $60 million business was in the United States.^[19]

Lev Leviev, the owner of the Africa-Israel Group, acquired Gottex in 1997.^[10] After about a year heading the design team, Gottlieb left the company.^[4][8][11] Once her non-compete agreement with Gottex expired, at the age of 85 she founded a new swimwear design company, under her own name.^{[4][11][20][21]}

In 2005, Gottlieb was voted the 167th-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.^[22]

References