Sonja de Lennart

Sonja de Lennart (born 21 May 1920) is a German fashion designer. In 1948, she invented capri pants.

Fashion career
In 1945, after the war, Sonja de Lennart began to produce fashion wear and opened her first boutique, Salon Sonja, in Munich. Her fashion career began when the fashion advisor of the Taylor's Guild, M. Ponater, allowed de Lennart to exhibit one of her first creations (a hand painted dress which she painted herself and displayed on a mannequin) in one corner of Ponater’s booth of the leading Fashion Trade Fair, Handwerksmesse, where he was displaying and selling his own fashion collection. This one and only opportunity to show her talent had customers standing in line to place orders for which she wasn’t prepared. This event turned into the beginning of the distribution of de Lennart’s creations. The demand for her designs was so overwhelming that soon after, the family began to manufacture another of her creations, imitation leather vestures, as well as three-quarter length coats that were exhibited at the Craftsman Fair and distributed nationwide becoming a bestseller.

In that same year, she created a wide-swinging skirt with a wide belt (which she modeled herself), a blouse, and hat. Her design collection was named the Capri Collection after the Island of Capri that was important to the designer. In 1948, after years of women wearing the typical wide and rather masculine pants, de Lennart created the Capri pant with a short slit on the outer-side of the pant leg.