The Queens of New York
Author Julie Satow celebrates a triumvirate of female fashion powerhouses in her new book, "When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion"
Also in this issue:
Is John Galliano going back to Dior?
Remembering style icon Jane Birkin on the first anniversary of her death
First Lady Jill Biden is Paris bound
When we talk about grand department stores in their glory years, we often recall the men who founded and led them: 19th-century trailblazers John Wanamaker in Philadelphia and Marshall Field in Chicago, and the effervescent Stanley Marcus of Neiman-Marcus in Dallas. The Gimbel brothers in New York, and the Lit Brothers in Philadelphia. In Fashionopolis, I profile the farsighted founder of Selfridges: American-born merchant Harry Gordon Selfridge, formerly of Marshall Field’s. Even the Marx Brothers made one of their zany comedies, The Big Store, about a fictional department store called Phelps, run by a retail magnate named Hiram Phelps. (If you haven’t seen it, you do dial it up.)
But, as New York Times best-selling author Julie Satow tells us in When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion, her new book published by Doubleday, there were three formidable female retailers who steered some of New York’s most beloved department stores during their 20th century heydays: Hortense Odlum of Bonwit Teller in the 1930s, Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor in the mid-century years, and Geraldine Stutz of Henri Bendel in the 1960s.
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