Charlot

Isabelle Charlot was born in Mauritius to Chagossian parents, and has lived in the UK - where she is the chairperson of the Chagos Islanders Movement - for 19 years.

"That is what my family and I have been waiting for," Ms Charlot told the BBC.

That, quite by accident, is what Juli Lynne Charlot did in late 1947, in the process creating a totem of midcentury material culture as evocative as the saddle shoe, the Hula-Hoop and the pink plastic lawn flamingo.

Ms. Charlot, a New York native who died at her home in Tepoztlán, Mexico, on Sunday at 101, had been a Hollywood singer before her marriage in the mid-1940s to a viscount, or British nobleman.

Over the years, circle skirts by Ms. Charlot and her many imitators came adorned with a range of figurative appliqués, often comprising small visual narratives.