When Women Ruled Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power in the Early Days of American Fashion Julie Sato
In 1980, Donald J. Trump made the front page of The New York Times after assaulting two scantily clad women in a Fifth Avenue department store.
The fact that the female figures were made of stone and attached to the Bonwit Teller building, which was being demolished and replaced with Trump Tower, was of little consolation to the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who had been promised the beauty of these Art Deco bas-reliefs that had long hovered above pedestrians' heads but were now in ruins.
The sculpture's meaning is as allegorical as it is architectural. Department stores have always been the domain of women, despite being built primarily by men. “Women's Paradise” is the English title of Émile Zola's 1883 novel, set in a store modeled after Le Bon Marché, which still stands in Paris despite the ravages of electronic commerce. Patricia Highsmith sets her fictional Frankenberg, modeled after Bloomingdale's, in her 1952 lesbian romance novel, The Price of Salt.
Now Julie Sato has written a biography of the department store stalwarts who ran the show for the male founders and owners whose names graced their facades: in their heyday, these stores were veritable theaters of sorts.
It was a good idea to bring together these three queens from different eras, as well as to include brief sketches of people further away from Fifth Avenue, such as Maggie Walker, the black entrepreneur who opened St. Luke's Emporium to serve her segregated Richmond, Virginia, community in 1905, and Beatrice Fox Auerbach of G. Fox of Hartford, Connecticut, who was the inspiration for Menken's clever heiress, Rachel Menken, on “Mad Men.”
While there may not be any biographies of either of them, Odlum wrote a phony memoir called “A Place for Women.” Sato's references are long-out-of-print perfumes. Taken as a whole, they're a powerful force. You can imagine them roaming the giant perfume aisles of the sky. After “Suffs,” maybe “Spritzes”?
Stutz, who died in 2005, is still remembered by parts of Manhattan's aristocracy, and her portrayal is fleshed out by interviews with authors who wrote for The Times (including the Styles column, where I once worked) and who previously wrote a book about the Plaza Hotel.
“Fleshed out” is not a word that would immediately apply to Stutz; she would probably have been fired for accusing him of being fat today. Under her watch, Bendel's stocked only the equivalent of a modern-day size six. But she also revolutionized retail with the opening of her stores' winding “Shop Street” in 1959. (After touring it, Bergdorf Goodman's then-president sneered, “Flop Street.”) At her weekly open calls, known as the “Friday Morning Lineup,” young artisans competed for a coveted spot in her inventory as if trying to get into a nightclub.
Shaver had come to New York from Arkansas by way of Chicago with her sister, who would go on to design the popular Quirky Little Shaver dolls featured in Lord & Taylor's Christmas windows.
Hired by her mother's cousin as the store manager, Dorothy rose through the ranks (eventually taking his job) and transformed the store's practices: opening the famous Birdcage restaurant serving tea sandwiches, introducing personal shopping that Bergdorf's Betty Halbreich refined to a high art, promoting American designers in an all-French era, and generally establishing “the department store as an arbiter of culture comparable to galleries and even museums,” Sato writes. To some extent, Shaver, who was ashamed to be the granddaughter of a Confederate soldier who had joined the Ku Klux Klan, used her power to promote racial equality.
The most pessimistic of the three is Odlum, devastated after her husband, the Wall Street tycoon who bought Bonwit, dumped her for an affair with a Saks manicurist (and later an aviator)—a scandal that a salon colleague claims in her memoir was the basis for Clare Boothe Luce's play, “The Women.”
Odlum oversaw such innovations as moving hats (a “harmless whim” – an impulse buy) from an upstairs location to a more prominent spot, clubs where men could gawk at underwear models while their wives shopped, and a best-selling novel by an advertising head that romanticized the life of an assistant buyer.
“A big shop adds a lot of sparkle and fun to the mundane business of everyday life,” one sentence reads. This was certainly true when Salvador Dalà was asked to exhibit and, in a fit of artistic urge, hurled a bathtub full of sewage at the Bonwit's window.
Odlum married three times after that, but the resentment persisted, blaming her own workload for the difficulties of raising children. “When my grandmother died, I remember my father saying something like, 'Oh, the old witch is finally dead,'” her grandson told Sato.
Indeed, there is something Oz-like about the Technicolor world of department stores: pneumatic tubes blast cash and sales slips into the ceiling, display directors whisk mannequin Cynthia around every corner, including El Morocco, and, in one Oklahoma City store, endless varieties of merchandise, including babies for adoption.
If suburban shopping malls have damaged the institution, the 24/7 Internet metropolis has made it a ghost town. Reading Sato's book, one is left nostalgic for the sweet silence that comes when the gates close, the doorman goes home, and the shopping is done and you go to sleep.
When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: The charm and power of the early days of American fashion | Julie Sato | Doubleday | 320 pages. | $32.50