When Women Ran on 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 two 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 in the process of being demolished and replaced by Trump Tower, was of little comfort to the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who had been promised these Art Deco models Bas-relief beauties – long floating above pedestrians, now broken.
The meaning of the sculptures was both allegorical and architectural: department stores, although built predominantly by men, have always been female domains. The Ladies’ Paradise is the English title of Émile Zola’s 1883 novel, set in a store modeled on Le Bon Marché that still stands in Paris despite the ravages of e-commerce. Patricia Highsmith set her 1952 lesbian romance The Price of Salt in the fictional Frankenberg’s, based on Bloomingdale’s.
Now Julie Satow has written a group biography of the department store doyens who called the shots – and these places were actually a kind of theater in their heyday – for the male founders and owners whose names adorned the facades.
It was smart to bring together these three queens from different eras, along with shorter sketches of figures further from Fifth Avenue, like black entrepreneur Maggie Walker, who founded the St. Luke Emporium for her congregation in segregated Richmond, Virginia, in 1905. opened; and Beatrice Fox Auerbach of G. Fox in Hartford, Connecticut, the inspiration for brainy offspring Rachel Menken of Menken on “Mad Men.”
Not each of them may have had their own biography, although Odlum did write a hypocritical memoir, A Woman’s Place. long out of print, from which Satow draws. Taken together, they are a force. You can imagine them walking around the big perfume counter in the sky. After “Suffs” maybe “Spritzes”?
Stutz, who died in 2005, is still remembered by certain cadres of the Manhattan aristocracy, and her account is supported by interviews conducted by the author, who contributed to The Times (including the Styles section where I once worked). ) and has previously written a book about the Plaza Hotel.
Not that “concretely crafted” is a phrase one would happily apply to Stutz, which would almost certainly have been canceled these days for “fat-shaming”; Under her supervision, Bendel’s only filled its inventory to the equivalent of a modern size 6. But it also revolutionized retail with a winding “Street of Shops” that opened at the store in 1959 (“Street of Flops,” sneered the then-president of). Bergdorf Goodman after viewing it). At a weekly open call called the “Friday Morning Lineup,” young artisans vied for a coveted spot in their inventory as if they were trying to get into a nightclub.
Shaver had long before come to New York from Arkansas via Chicago for fun with her sister, who was to design popular and strange Little Shaver dolls to be featured in the Christmas windows of Lord & Taylor.
Dorothy was hired by the store’s manager, a third cousin of her mother. She worked her way up the corporate ladder (and eventually got his job) and changed business practices: opening the Bird Cage, a famous restaurant that served tea sandwiches; Introduction to the style of personal shopping that Betty Halbreich has honed to a fine art in Bergdorf; promoting American designers in a French-obsessed era; and more broadly, it notes “that department stores could compete with galleries and even museums as cultural arbiters,” writes Satow. Ashamed of being the granddaughter of a Confederate who had joined the Ku Klux Klan, Shaver also used her power to some extent to promote racial equality.
The Debbie Downer of the trio is Odlum, who is devastated after her husband, a Wall Street tycoon who bought Bonwit, leaves her to work as a manicurist at Saks (and later Aviator). A salon colleague claimed in his own memoirs that the scandal formed the basis of Clare Boothe Luce’s play The Women.
Odlum oversaw innovations that included moving hats (“harmless whims,” also called impulse purchases) from an upper floor to celebrities, a club for men where they could ogle lingerie models while their wives shopped, and a best-selling novel of the advertising manager who romanticized the life of an assistant buyer.
“A big store adds so much sparkle and fun to the everyday prosy business,” reads one line. This was certainly true when Salvador Dalí was commissioned to do exhibitions and, in a fit of artistic anger, hurled a bathtub filled with dirty water through Bonwit’s window.
Odlum married three more times, but remained bitter, blaming her workload for problems raising children. “When my grandmother died,” says one of Satow’s grandsons, “I remember my father saying something like, ‘Well, the old witch is finally dead.'”
In fact, there’s something Oz-esque about the technicolor world of the department store, with its pneumatic tubes hurling cash and sales receipts to the ceiling; the exhibition manager who took a mannequin, Cynthia, with her everywhere, including to El Morocco; The endless variety of goods at one store in Oklahoma City even extends to adoptable babies.
If the suburban mall hurt this institution, the 24-hour Grand Bazaar of the Internet has turned it into a ghost town. In Satow’s book, you long for the glorious silence when the gates are lowered, the bouncers go home, and shopping gives way to sleep time.
When women walked on Fifth Avenue: Glamor and power at the dawn of American fashion | By Julie Satow | Double day | 320 p. | $32.50
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2024-06-02 09:03:02
www.nytimes.com
