Auguste Jean LeCoutre- The Salon 1926-1939 (6 Foster Street & 9 Norwich Street)

Auguste LeCoutre was a French immigrant who was one of the most acclaimed corset designers of his era. After serving many years as head designer at the Royal Worcester Corset, he forged out on his own with a retail shop at 6 Foster and a factory at 9 Norwich, just around the corner. Today the location of his shop is a parking lot to the right of the building at 2 Foster Street.

Auguste J. LeCoutre disembarked from steamship Saxonia in Boston in 1905, enroute to the Royal Worcester Corset factory. There he would become the firm's lead designer, probably replacing designer and entrepreneur Mary Heintzelman who had left Royal Worcester the previous year to start her own company (Corset H, later Ivy Corset). One of many immigrants in these early century corset stories, LeCoutre brought with him 1,000 francs, his wife and three daughters, and a Parisian flair for fashion and style, the latter immediately enhancing the production line at Royal Worcester. 

A year later he filed the first of many patents in conjunction with the Royal Worcester Corset Company. His skills as a designer and "draughtsman" (per the Saxonia's manifest) were those of an inventor in the industry, one who continually tinkered with the concept of the corset, the workings of its fasteners, the physics of its construction. His work was a continuation of that of Lavinia Foy (also profiled on this tour) over fifty years earlier.

Trade journals reported in 1912 that LeCoutre was leaving Royal Worcester for a business venture with three other company employees, a partnership based in New York City, a "corporation to undertake the manufacture of corsets on a large scale." (fn: September 1912, Women's and Infant's Furnisher). Three years later LeCoutre resigned from that New York venture and returned to Royal Worcester, an announcement that appeared in papers across the United States, speaking to the prominence of the company and its lead designer. He stayed with Royal Worcester for another ten years during which Royal Worcester's ads proclaimed him to be "the greatest living corset artist."

In the mid-1920s he launched his own Worcester-based corset firm, a "salon" (6 Foster Street) and a factory (9 Norwich Street), both located in the downtown core. "The Salon" offered patrons an array of "women's shop" merchandise: corsets, of course, as well as handbags, hosiery, and perfume, some presumably selected by LeCoutre himself during his transatlantic travels. The Salon's listings in the city directories lasted only a few years but the factory continued with his daughter Martha involved as private secretary, stenographer, clerk, and eventually president-treasurer. She stayed in the corset business until around 1950, long after her father's death in September of 1936.

ancestry.com

newspapers.com

Women's and Infant's Furnisher

Worcester city directories

A Proper Fit (working title), Anne Marie Murphy. TidePool Press 2025, www.cityofcorsets.com.