It’s hard to remember when friends gathered for tea at Lord & Taylor after a rough day of shopping. When Bonwit Teller’s signature look was its 15-foot-tall limestone relief panels depicting nearly nude women dancing at the top of its building’s façade. Or when Bendel’s excited the ladies who lunched with its own fragrance, the first in-store makeovers and its own fashion show.
It’s even harder to remember that these palaces of consumption were ruled by women. Hortense Odlum of Bonwit Teller came to her husband’s department store as a housewife tasked with attracting more shoppers like herself – and wound up running the company. Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor become the first businesswoman to earn a $1 million salary. And Geraldine Stutz reinvented the look of the modern department store at Henri Bendel with a preternatural sense for trends.
In her compulsively readable When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion, journalist Julie Satow draws back the curtain on these three visionaries and captures the department stores of yore in all their glitz and decadence.
The award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Plaza, Julie Satow is a regular contributor to The New York Times and has written for National Public Radio, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Travel + Leisure, among other outlets.