WHEN WOMEN RUN THE FIFTH AVENUE: Glamor and power at the dawn of American fashion, by Julie Satow
In 1980, Donald J. Trump made the front page of The New York Times after attacking a pair of scantily clad women in a Fifth Avenue department store.
That the women were made of stone and attached to the Bonwit Teller building, which was about to be demolished and replaced by Trump Tower, was of little consolation to the administrators of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to whom these Art Deco pieces were promised. bas-relief beauties – long floating above pedestrians, now shattered.
The meaning of the sculptures was both allegorical and architectural: department stores, although built mainly by men, have always been female domains. “The Ladies’ Paradise” is the English title of Émile Zola’s 1883 novel, set in a shop modeled after Le Bon Marche, still standing in Paris, despite the ravages of e-commerce. Patricia Highsmith framed her 1952 lesbian romance ‘The Price of Salt’ at the fictional Frankenberg’s, based on Bloomingdale’s.
Now Julie Satow has written a group biography of the Doyennes department store that ran the show – and these places were truly a form of theater in their heyday – for the male founders and owners whose names graced the facades.
It was smart to bring together these three queens from different time periods, along with shorter sketches of figures further from Fifth Avenue, such as black entrepreneur Maggie Walker, who opened the St. Luke Emporium in 1905 for her community in segregated Richmond, Virginia ; and Beatrice Fox Auerbach of G. Fox in Hartford, Conn., the inspiration for Menken’s savvy scion Rachel Menken on “Mad Men.”
Perhaps not all of them had their own biography, although Odlum did write a mock memoir, ‘A Woman’s Place’, long out of print, from which Satow draws. All told, they are a force. You can imagine them walking around the large perfume counter in the air. After ‘Suffs’ maybe ‘Spritzes’?
Stutz, who died in 2005, is still remembered by a certain cadre of Manhattan aristocracy, and her portrayal is elaborated in interviews with the author, who contributed to The Times (including the Styles section, where I used to work) and previously wrote a book about the Plaza hotel.
Not that “extensive” is a phrase easily applied to Stutz, which today would almost certainly have been canceled for fat-shaming; under her watch, Bendel only stocked the equivalent of a contemporary size 6. But she also revolutionized retail with a winding “street of shops” that opened inside the store in 1959 (“Street of Flops,” sneered the store’s then-president). Bergdorf Goodman after he toured it). During a weekly open call known as the Friday Morning Lineup, young artisans vied for a coveted spot in her inventory, as if trying to break into a nightclub.
Shaver had long ago arrived in New York from Arkansas via Chicago, along with her sister, who would go on to create popular and strange designs. Little Shaver Dolls featured in Lord & Taylor’s Christmas windows.
Hired by the store’s president, a third cousin of her mother, Dorothy worked her way up the ranks (and eventually got his job) and changed practices: opening the Bird Cage, a famous restaurant that serves tea sandwiches; introducing the kind of personal shopping refined to a high art by Betty Halbreich in Bergdorf; promoting American designers in a French-obsessed era; and, in general, establishing “that department stores could rival galleries and even museums as cultural arbiters,” Satow writes. Shaver was ashamed of being the granddaughter of a Confederate who had joined the Ku Klux Klan and, to some extent, also used her power to promote racial equality.
The Debbie Downer of the trio is Odlum, devastated after her husband, a Wall Street magnate who bought Bonwit, left her for a manicure at Saks (and later, a flier). A salon colleague claimed in his own memoir that the scandal was the basis for Clare Boothe Luce’s play “The Women.”
Odlum oversaw innovations including moving hats (“harmless whims,” also known as impulse buys) from an upstairs to prominence, a club where men could ogle lingerie models while their wives shopped, and a bestselling novel from the head of advertising who romanticized fashion. life of an assistant buyer.
“A big store adds so much glitz and fun to everyday activities,” read one line. This was certainly the case when Salvador Dalí was commissioned to create exhibitions and, in a fit of artistic rage, crashed a bathtub filled with dirty water through Bonwit’s window.
Odlum married three more times but remained bitter and blamed her workload for the problems raising her children. “When my grandmother died,” a grandson tells Satow, “I remember my father saying something like, ‘Well, the old witch is finally dead.’”
There is, in fact, something Oz-like about the Technicolor world of the department store, with its pneumatic tubes slinging cash and sales figures reaching the ceiling; the exhibition director who took one mannequin, Cynthia, everywhere, including El Morocco; the boundless variety of goods, ranging even, in one store in Oklahoma City, to babies for adoption.
If the suburban mall has damaged this institution, the 24/7 big bazaar of the Internet has turned it into a ghost town. In Satow’s book one longs for that wonderful silence when the gate rolls down, the doormen go home and shopping gives way to sleep time.
WHEN WOMEN RUN FIFTH AVENUE: Glamor and power at the dawn of American fashion | By Julie Satow | Double day | 320 pages | $32.50
