Australian Dictionary of Biography

Elly Lukas, 1960, by Athol Shmith

National Gallery of Victoria, courtesy of Michael Shmith

Elly Lukas (1924–1999), fashion model, beauty college owner, and community worker, was born on 27 July 1924 at Stavros, Ithaca, Greece, youngest of three daughters of Greek-born Andreas Lekatsas, and his French Huguenot wife Jeanne, née Boulin. With her sisters, Elly grew up on the island of Ithaca where her parents owned a hotel and restaurant. Raised bilingually by their mother, the girls were accomplished speakers of French and Greek. Elly attended the local school until it was closed during World War II, later completing her education at a convent school in Athens where she studied English and Italian. After the war there was a renewed wave of migration from Greece to Australia, with migrants from Ithaca continuing to settle predominantly in Victoria. Elly’s sister Anthoula had migrated with her husband in 1935 and Elly applied to join them. She departed Athens in late 1946, but her ship was delayed in Egypt, where she met her future husband, Alexander Zotos, a staff manager at the Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo.

Arriving in Melbourne on 21 April 1947, Lekatsas found work at Foy & Gibson’s department store in the city. She worked as a cosmetician until an invitation to model hats for the rival Myer department store proved to be her entrée into the world of fashion. Adopting the professional name Elly Lukas, she began modelling collections of hats, accessories, and haute couture garments. Of slim build and medium height, with brown hair and eyes, she became known as a model of great poise and elegance. In February 1954 she won a Mannequin of the Year award at a Melbourne fashion show. Her striking looks ensured she was a favourite subject of the leading Melbourne photographers Athol Shmith, Henry Talbot, and Helmut Newton, and she appeared frequently in the popular magazines Woman’s Day and the Australian Women’s Weekly.

After her arrival in Australia, Lukas had corresponded with Zotos until he migrated in 1952. On 18 January 1953 they married at the Greek Orthodox Church, East Melbourne. They later had two children, Elise (b. 1961) and Alex (b. 1965). In 1954 the couple established the Elly Lukas School of Elegance, at the ‘Paris End’ of Collins Street, which provided lessons in modelling, deportment, and make-up. Lukas had ‘a natural ability to communicate with people of all ages’ (Maios 2018) and projected her skills and charm effortlessly and without pretension. This ‘enabled her to promote the importance of confidence, poise, and manners’ (Maios 2018) to generations of Victorian women. From 1956 the school also offered tuition in fashion sense, fitness exercises, dieting, etiquette, and speechcraft. In 1957, the year she was naturalised, she travelled overseas to study television make-up in California and to visit finishing schools in Europe. While in Paris, she also modelled for the couturier Christian Dior just two months before he died.

At its peak, the Elly Lukas school accommodated 125 students each week, with Lukas supervising four classes every evening. Over time the business focused more on beautician courses, and in the 1980s it was renamed the Elly Lukas Beauty Therapy College. In Melbourne she was often invited as a guest speaker to community events, and she donated prizes for competitions such as the Argus newspaper’s ‘Business Girl Quest’ in 1956. She also supported the many migrant women working in the rag trade in Melbourne, including in their campaigns for better working conditions. While touring Europe in 1968, she was interviewed on television in Athens to promote a film about Australian migration produced by the Commonwealth Film Unit. Her son later observed that his mother ‘was placed on this earth to improve the life of migrant women’ (Maios 2018).

Lukas was invited onto the boards of many Melbourne charities that worked with women and children, including the Lady Mayoress’s Committee and Quota International. Perhaps influenced by her sister Anthoula’s experience of raising a son with a disability, she became a life governor of the Adult Deaf and Dumb Society of Victoria, and supported the Spastic Children’s Society of Victoria, St Paul’s School for the Blind, and the Royal Women’s and Royal Children’s hospitals.

Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1966, Lukas escaped the ravages of the disease through surgery and radiotherapy until the cancer recurred in 1993. Survived by her husband and their two children, she died on 4 July 1999 at St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne. She was buried in Brighton cemetery after a funeral at St John’s Greek Orthodox Church, Carlton. Diane Masters, a modelling contemporary, recalled Lukas was ‘a vibrant woman—as strong on the inside as she was beautiful outside … [who] had truly international style and appeal and was much admired as a symbol of femininity and timeless elegance’ (Jones 1999, 14). In 2010 the Ithacan Historical Society presented a retrospective exhibition of Lukas’s fifty years in Melbourne’s fashion industry. The National Gallery of Victoria holds portraits of her by Athol Shmith and the State Library of Victoria holds portraits by Henry Talbot.