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WHEN WOMEN RAN FIFTH AVENUE: Glamour and Power on the Dawn of American Fashion, by Julie Satow
In 1980, Donald J. Trump made the entrance web page of The New York Times after assaulting a pair of scantily clad girls at a Fifth Avenue division retailer.
That the ladies had been made from stone and had been connected to the constructing of Bonwit Teller, within the technique of being razed and changed by Trump Tower, was of little consolation to the trustees on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had been promised these Art Deco bas-relief beauties — lengthy hovering over pedestrians, now shattered.
The sculptures’ significance was allegorical in addition to architectural: Department shops, although erected principally by males, have at all times been female domains. “The Ladies’ Paradise” is the English title of Émile Zola’s 1883 novel, set at a retailer modeled after Le Bon Marché, nonetheless standing in Paris regardless of the ravages of e-commerce. Patricia Highsmith framed her 1952 lesbian romance “The Price of Salt” on the fictional Frankenberg’s, primarily based on Bloomingdale’s.
Now Julie Satow has written a gaggle biography of the department-store doyennes who ran the present — and these locations of their heyday actually had been a type of theater — for the male founders and homeowners whose names adorned the facades.
It was intelligent to convene these three queens from completely different intervals, together with shorter sketches of figures farther from Fifth Avenue, just like the Black entrepreneur Maggie Walker, who in 1905 opened the St. Luke Emporium for her neighborhood in segregated Richmond, Va.; and Beatrice Fox Auerbach of G. Fox in Hartford, Conn., the inspiration for the savvy scion Rachel Menken of Menken’s on “Mad Men.”
Each won’t have sustained a biography of her personal, although Odlum did write a dissembling memoir, “A Woman’s Place,” lengthy out of print, from which Satow attracts. Considered in mixture, they’re a pressure. You can think about them milling across the nice fragrance counter within the sky. After “Suffs,” perhaps “Spritzes”?
Stutz, who died in 2005, continues to be remembered by a sure cadre of Manhattan aristocracy, and her portrayal is fleshed out by interviews carried out by the creator, who has contributed to The Times (together with the Styles part, the place I used to work) and beforehand wrote a e book concerning the Plaza resort.
Not that “fleshed out” is a phrase readily utilized to Stutz, who nowadays would have nearly actually been canceled for fat-shaming; beneath her oversight, Bendel’s solely stocked as much as the equal of a recent dimension 6. But she additionally revolutionized retail with a winding “avenue of retailers” that opened inside the shop in 1959 (“Street of Flops,” sneered the then-president of Bergdorf Goodman after he toured it). At a weekly open name generally known as the Friday Morning Lineup, younger artisans vied for a coveted spot in her stock as if making an attempt to get right into a nightclub.
Shaver had arrived in New York lengthy earlier than, from Arkansas by the use of Chicago, on a lark along with her sister, who would design widespread and peculiar Little Shaver dolls featured in Lord & Taylor’s Christmas home windows.
Hired by the shop’s president, a 3rd cousin of her mom’s, Dorothy labored her method up by the ranks (ultimately getting his job) and altered its practices: opening the Bird Cage, a well-known restaurant serving tea sandwiches; introducing the sort of private procuring refined to a excessive artwork by Betty Halbreich at Bergdorf; selling American designers in a French-obsessed period; and, typically, establishing “that department shops might rival galleries, and even museums, as cultural arbiters,” Satow writes. Abashed to be granddaughter to a Confederate who joined the Ku Klux Klan, Shaver additionally used her energy to advertise racial equality, up to some extent.
The Debbie Downer of the trio is Odlum, devastated after her husband, a Wall Street tycoon who’d purchased Bonwit, left her for a manicurist at Saks (and later aviator). A salon colleague asserted in his personal memoir that the scandal was the premise for the Clare Boothe Luce play “The Women.”
Odlum supervised improvements together with transferring hats (“innocent whimsies,” a.ok.a. impulse purchases) from an higher ground to prominence, a membership for males to ogle lingerie fashions whereas their wives shopped, and a best-selling novel by the top of promoting that romanticized the lifetime of an assistant purchaser.
“An enormous retailer provides so many glitter and enjoyable to the prosy enterprise of on a regular basis residing,” learn one line. This was actually true when Salvador Dalí was commissioned to do shows, and crashed a tub stuffed with soiled water by Bonwit’s window in a match of inventive pique.
Odlum married three extra instances however remained bitter, blaming her workload for bother rearing her kids. “When my grandmother died,’’ a grandson tells Satow, “I bear in mind my father saying one thing alongside the traces of, ‘Well, the previous witch is lastly dead.’”
There is actually one thing Oz-like concerning the Technicolor world of the division retailer, with its pneumatic tubes that swooshed money and gross sales slips as much as the ceiling; the show director who took one model, Cynthia, in all places, together with El Morocco; the limitless number of items ranging even, at one retailer in Oklahoma City, to infants for adoption.
If the suburban mall did this establishment harm, the 24-7 grand bazaar of the web made it a ghost city. Satow’s e book has one eager for that pleasant hush when the gates rolled down, the doormen went residence and procuring gave method to sleepytime.
WHEN WOMEN RAN FIFTH AVENUE: Glamour and Power on the Dawn of American Fashion | By Julie Satow | Doubleday | 320 pp. | $32.50
