He was not French, though his name really was Henri Bendel. Well, Henry Bendel anyway. He was born into a Jewish family in Lafayette, Louisiana, in 1868, and he went on to become a renowned arbiter of style and the founder of what once among the most elegant department stores in Manhattan.
In his new book, Henri Bendel, and the Worlds He Fashioned, Tim Allis tells this extraordinary American story. Bendel’s family owned a dry goods store in sleepy Lafayette. It was staffed by a wide extended family; it prospered and expanded. But this small town empire could not hold Henry.
By the mid-1890s, he had set out for Manhattan. He began with hats—at the time these indispensable accessories were humongous behemoths, like boats laden with cargos of blossoms and bows (even the occasional taxidermied bird), poised on every fashionable head. So famous were his creations that Cole Porter memorialized them in his lyric to “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 millenary Bendel expanded to fashion. He had an undeniable nose for future trends, though his airy pronouncements, reported in the contemporary press, could seem ridiculously snobby— “Don’t wear a white hat unless you are so beautiful it doesn’t matter what you wear…” were among his instructions. But he was first and foremost a shrewd retailer, not above introducing egalitarian innovations when the market dictated. At his famous flagship, whose brown and white striped awnings beckoned on 57th Street for three-quarters of a century, he sold branded soaps and perfumes, he offered gloves for those who craved a Bendel’s label but couldn’t afford an entire ensemble. And then there were those famous semi-annual sales. In Florine Stettheimer’s wonderful 1921 painting, Spring Sale at Bendel’s, you can see the man himself overseeing the delightful mayhem.
He also copied, with permission, the Paris ensembles he sought out on his many trips abroad. To the end he was a Francophile, insisting that French women were the chicest. “American styles? Pouf!” he once sniffed, with a dismissive wave of the hand. He took the most extravagant ocean liners to and from the continent multiple times a year and didn’t curtail his visits even during World War I.
He did not travel alone. His was a sprawling unorthodox household, consisting of his widowed half-sister, her two children, and two male companions—John Blish, who was over a decade his senior, and with whom Bendel once described as having “a lifelong intimate relationship,” and Abraham Bastado, 10 years younger. Bliss and Bastado were labeled in the press variously as servants, colleagues, and companions—but the truth was no doubt hiding in plain sight.
Allis does a fine job telling the story of this singular American, all the more impressive since he had so little to work with. Bendel left no diaries, wrote no memoir, there were not even letters. The author has pieced together this tale from snippets in the public record—newspaper clippings, various announcements, and the fading recollections of descendants.
Luckily, as scant as the personal documents are, the advertisements and magazine features are plentiful, and the book is lavishly illustrated. Here are the stars of the silent screen, celebrities like Billie Burke and Lillian Gish, accoutered in Bendel’s frocks; here are breathless descriptions of his increasingly sumptuous estates.
Alas, like so many retail stories, this one does not have a happy ending. Bendel passed away in 1936. At first his relatives kept the company afloat; then the business endured a series of owners. It had a burst of life when Geraldine Stutz arrived in 1957 and installed the famous Street of Shops, a series of boutiques that captured the insouciant spirit of the 1960s and ’70s, and introduced such designers as Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren, and Zandra Rhodes. But those glory days did not last. The store moved around the corner to Fifth Avenue in 1985, and the business closed permanently in 2019.
Was it purely a victim of its time? Can an enterprise built on refinement, that wears its uniqueness proudly on its cashmere sleeve, have any role in this modern world? “What I regret today,” Stutz once said, “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.”
