Lillian Louise Lidman was born inSavannah, Georgia, the daughter of William F. Lidman and Louise Anderson Lidman.[1] Her parents were immigrants from Sweden. The Lidman family moved to Chicago when Lillian was young. She attended aSwedenborgian boarding school in Ohio.[2]
As a young woman, Lillian Lidman was a musical performer on the stage, touring with a stock company out of Chicago.[3] She also designed costumes for theatre.[4][5] After she married, she lived in the New York area, and designed and built several houses inMount Kisco, New York.[6] After her husband asked her to create lightweight poseable mannequins for a theatre lobby display, she patented her designs,[7][8][9] including one with colleague Cora Scovil,[10] and formed the Greneker Corporation with Edgar Rosenthal in 1937, to produce mannequins.[11][12] She built mannequins with rubber waists, to allow cinching into a "wasp" silhouette as well as more natural positioning. "Many claimes to 'firsts' in mannequin art are credited to Mrs. Greneker," explained a 1939 newspaper account.[13]
She talked about her work with hostAdelaide Hawley on an early television program, "The Lady Means Business", in 1946.[14] In 1951 she left the Greneker Corporation[15] and founded Lillian Greneker Inc., adding other display items and theatrical props to her product line.[16] Greneker's company moved to Los Angeles after World War II.[17]
Greneker invented the Fingertip, athimble with various gadget attachments, in the 1930s.[18][19] When her mannequin factory inPleasantville, New York, was converted for defense use during World War II, she invented a disposable self-sealing gas tank for planes and submarines.[20][21][22] In 1978, she received one more patent, an update to her thimble concept.[23]
Lillian Greneker exhibited her sculptures in New York in the 1950s.[24] She worked on a new design for theatrical sets in the 1950s, to make lightweightpapier-mâché dimensional backdrops.[25] In 1970 she was credited as production designer on a horror film,Guru, the Mad Monk.[26]
Lillian Lidman married Claude Pritchard Greneker, a theatre publicist, in 1921. She was widowed in 1949,[27] and she died in 1990, aged 94 years, at an actors' nursing home in New Jersey.[6][28] Her papers are at theSchlesinger Library at Harvard, and include plays and poems she wrote, photographs, and clippings.[2]
Her house in Mount Kisco is now known as the Greneker Retreat, and the gardens are open once a year for tours.[29][30] The Greneker mannequin company remains in operation, based in Los Angeles, though the manufacturing now occurs in China.[17][31] In 2018, a Greneker mannequin nicknamed "Starman" was seated behind the wheel of anElon Musk's Tesla Roadster and launched into space bySpaceX.[32]
