Before there were Bergdorf Blondes, there was Betty Halbreich, the industry’s most famous personal shopper. The trim, white-haired, and always well accessorized Halbreich, who Vogue one described as “a clear-eyed fashion pro,”and who became something of a New York institution, has died, age 96.
For more than four decades Halbreich was the head of Bergdorf’s Solutions, a department she started in 1976 at the behest of Ira Neimark and Dawn Mello. By 1978, Vogue then reported, the idea of an “aimed-at-women shopping program,” was catching on. Certainly it reflected the times; as more women entered the workforce, not only did they have new situations to shop for, they had less time to do so.
Known for her “peppery candor,” as The New Yorker put it, the stylish and savvy Halbreich, née Stoll, was born in Chicago and moved to New York in 1947, after marrying a man in the garment industry. Halbreich worked on Seventh Avenue and for Geoffrey Beene’s diffusion line before the collapse of her marriage, which she related in Vogue, led to a stay in “a psychiatric hospital. A year after I recovered, Bergdorf Goodman opened a Geoffrey Beene boutique, and because of my experience with him, the store hired me to come in and run it.”
A year later she was tapped to work one-on-one with individual and professional clients after passing an “entrance exam,” successfully selling to Babe Paley, a society swan. Halbreich would go on to work with soap operas and TV series including Sex and the City (with Patricia Field) and Gossip Girl (with Eric Daman), and sat in front of the camera in the 2013 documentary on the iconic department store Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf Goodman. “I started working with Betty a million years ago,” says actor Candice Bergen, “she helped with the wardrobe for Starting Over [in 1979] and she found this amazing beaver-lined burgundy coat, among other things, but that’s the one I remember (they offered it to me but I didn’t take it because I’m an idiot!). But then she became one of my favorite people, I would go to Bergdorfs just to go visit her. Her office was a little nook that was, for me, the heart of Bergdorfs. She was so intelligent, feisty, fearless. She had a great sense of humor. It was just always fun with her. She knew who she was dealing with, she’d always try to get me to go out of my comfort zone and then I’d just come back to getting something navy. She’d come to the store really early every morning, before it opened, and prowl around and check what was on every floor. She was the maven of Bergdorfs, it won’t be the same.”
The daughter of a bookshop owner, and an avid reader herself, Halbreich published a pair of memoirs, Secrets of a Fashion Therapist (1997) and I’ll Drink to That (2015). Halbreich, who once stated in Vogue, “I can tell you what’s on every rack in every department,” had a discerning eye. “Fashion is what is given to you through the media, magazines, etc.,” she said in an online interview. “Style is what you slip into [to] face the mirror and smile.”
Linda Fargo, SVP of fashion and store presentation director, and a BG institution herself, offered this remembrance on Instagram: “Here’s to you Betty Halbreich! We can’t believe that we won’t run into you in the morning in the elevator again, wearing one of your perfectly cared for handsome wool cardigans accented with a sentimental pin at your shoulder, that mischievous and knowing look in your eye, and a counted on quick comment on the day which always summed it up in as few words possible, spot on! In a world which can often busy itself with superficial concerns, one had to appreciate your take-no-prisoners no-nonsense approach to it all. Every moment with you was a masterclass in level headedness, ethics, delivering on the promise and, of course, style! All your clients, and associates and friends, could count on you for your honesty—how refreshing! You were, and still are, in a class and stratosphere of your own making, an Original! The halls and shops and elevators at Bergdorfs won’t be the same….”
