Henri Bendel, despite his French-sounding name, was born into a Jewish family in Lafayette, Louisiana, in 1868. He would later become a renowned fashion icon and the founder of one of Manhattan’s most elegant department stores. Tim Allis, in his new book ‘Henri Bendel, and the Worlds He Fashioned,’ delves into the extraordinary life of this American entrepreneur.
Bendel’s family ran a prosperous dry goods store in Lafayette, staffed by a large extended family. However, the small-town life couldn’t hold Henry. By the mid-1890s, he had embarked on a journey to Manhattan, where he started with hats. At the time, hats were grand, elaborate creations, resembling miniature boats adorned with blossoms, bows, and even the occasional taxidermied bird. His hat designs became so famous that Cole Porter immortalized them in his song ‘You’re the Top’: ‘You’re a melody from a symphony by Strauss, You’re a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet, You’re Mickey Mouse!’
From millinery, Bendel expanded into fashion, displaying an uncanny knack for identifying future trends. His pronouncements, often reported in the press, could appear incredibly snobbish – ‘Don’t wear a white hat unless you are so beautiful it doesn’t matter what you wear…’ was one of his notorious directives. Yet, beneath the veneer of snobbery, Bendel was a shrewd retailer, not afraid to introduce egalitarian innovations when the market demanded it.
At his flagship store, recognizable by its brown and white striped awnings on 57th Street for three-quarters of a century, Bendel offered everything from branded soaps and perfumes to gloves, catering to those who desired the Bendel’s label but couldn’t afford a complete outfit. The store was also famed for its semi-annual sales, a scene captured in Florine Stettheimer’s 1921 painting ‘Spring Sale at Bendel’s,’ which depicts Bendel himself overseeing the joyful chaos.
He was a Francophile at heart, believing French women to be the epitome of chic. ‘American styles? Pouf!’ he’d scoff with a dismissive wave of his hand. He travelled multiple times a year on extravagant ocean liners to and from Europe, even during World War I. Bendel was not a man of solitude; his was a large, unconventional household, comprising his widowed half-sister, her two children, and two male companions – John Blish, a decade his senior, and Abraham Bastado, a decade his junior. The press referred to Blish and Bastado variously as servants, colleagues, and companions, but their true relationship was undoubtedly more complex.
Despite Bendel’s lack of diaries, memoirs, or even letters, Allis managed to piece together a captivating story from fragments of the public record – newspaper clippings, announcements, and fading memories of descendants. Luckily, advertisements and magazine features abound, making the book lavishly illustrated. It features silent screen stars like Billie Burke and Lillian Gish adorned in Bendel’s frocks, alongside breathless descriptions of his opulent estates.
Like many retail stories, Bendel’s tale doesn’t have a happy ending. He died in 1936. His relatives kept the company afloat for a while, but it went through a series of owners. A revival occurred in 1957 when Geraldine Stutz arrived and introduced the ‘Street of Shops,’ a collection of boutiques that captured the carefree spirit of the 1960s and 1970s, showcasing designers like Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren, and Zandra Rhodes. Sadly, this golden era didn’t last. The store moved to Fifth Avenue in 1985 and permanently closed in 2019.
Was Bendel’s demise solely a casualty of changing times? Can an enterprise built on refinement and unique identity survive in a modern world? As Geraldine Stutz poignantly remarked, ‘What I regret today is that there may be no Bendel’s for somebody to turn around as I turned around the old-time Bendel’s. Any name with the kind of reputation and history from the turn of the century as the store of style, not just fashion, deserves to survive.’
