Not that “fleshed out” is a phrase readily applied to Stutz, who these days would have almost certainly been canceled for fat-shaming; under her oversight, Bendel’s only stocked up to 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 then-president of Bergdorf Goodman after he toured it). At a weekly open call known as the Friday Morning Lineup, young artisans vied for a coveted spot in her inventory as if trying to get into a nightclub.
Shaver had arrived in New York long before, from Arkansas by way of Chicago, on a lark with her sister, who would design popular and weird Little Shaver dolls featured in Lord & Taylor’s Christmas windows.
Hired by the store’s president, a third cousin of her mother’s, Dorothy worked her way up through the ranks (eventually getting his job) and changed its practices: opening the Bird Cage, a famous restaurant serving tea sandwiches; introducing the kind of personal shopping refined to a high art by Betty Halbreich at 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. Abashed to be granddaughter to a Confederate who joined the Ku Klux Klan, Shaver also used her power to promote racial equality, up to a point.
The Debbie Downer of the trio is Odlum, devastated after her husband, a Wall Street tycoon who’d bought Bonwit, left her for a manicurist at Saks (and later aviator). A salon colleague asserted in his own memoir that the scandal was the basis for the Clare Boothe Luce play “The Women.”
Odlum supervised innovations including moving hats (“harmless whimsies,” a.k.a. impulse purchases) from an upper floor to prominence, a club for men to ogle lingerie models while their wives shopped, and a best-selling novel by the head of advertising that romanticized the life of an assistant buyer.
Kaynak: briturkish.com
