51 pages • 1 hour read
Julie SatowWhen Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapter 10-Part 3, Interlude 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “Geraldine’s Street of Shops”
In 1957, Maxey Jarman, the man who convinced Geraldine Stutz to leave Glamour and work for I. Miller, commissioned her to take on the presidency of Henri Bendel, a small, failing department store in midtown. Her assessment of competing stores led her to embrace Bendel’s small size and transform it into an exclusive shopping space. She redesigned the interior of the store as an artificial piazza, with departments housed in individual shops, rather than being displayed in a single open space. This “street of shops” featured an ornate cosmetic salon, a children’s store, and a collection of handmade art from across the globe. Although her male competitors dismissed the idea, reviewers and consumers praised the unique and personal atmosphere. While updating some aspects of the store, Geraldine also sought to honor its storied history. The store’s doorman James Jarret Jr., known familiarly as Buster, had been at Bendel since nearly its inception. Geraldine immortalized the doorman with an enormously popular doll made in his likeness.
Geraldine also helped Henri Bendel to clarify the type of customer the store wished to target. Her ideal customers were wealthy, stylish women who wanted to be avant-garde without being extreme. Crucially, they were also thin: within four years of taking over Bendel, Geraldine dramatically decreased the sizes available, with the majority of the items being modern sizes 0-6. As a result, the “Bendel Look” became associated with wealthy, cosmopolitan, slim and stylish women. After five years of Geraldine’s leadership, Henri Bendel was once more financially profitable.
Part 3, Chapter 11 Summary: “Dorothy Branches Out”
Part 3 begins with an epigraph from Geraldine Stutz asserting that it’s normal for women, as humans, to want individual agency.
In the late 1940s, Lord & Taylor, along with many other department stores, began opening branches outside of major cities as post-war prosperity drove wealthy Americans to the suburbs. Dorothy Shaver proposed opening the first retail store as vice president in 1941 and expanded the program significantly when she became president in 1945. Lord & Taylor’s largest branch opened in 1955 outside of Philadelphia—a store that included a lounge and hospital for employees and the largest men’s department outside of the flagship store. Although these suburban branches were profitable, they had the unintended effect of drawing shoppers away from the flagships, which were less convenient for those living in the suburbs.
The biggest threat to stores like Lord & Taylor in this period was the rise of discount stores like Walmart, Kmart, and Target, which were all founded in 1962. Unlike the personal attention offered at department stores, discount stores had few sales staff and bare-bones designs, keeping prices low. In 1958 discounters represented less than 10% of merchandise sales; by 1967, they handled nearly 40% of all sales in the United States. Department stores responded by attempting to lower their own prices where possible and by lowering overhead costs, particularly by reducing staff salaries.
Dorothy Shaver died in 1959, one month before her 66th birthday. Nearly 1000 mourners attended her funeral.
Part 3, Chapter 12 Summary: “President Geraldine”
As New York department stores struggled to compete with suburban branches and discount stores, small institutions like Henri Bendel also faced the challenge of competing with larger conglomerates. Because these larger stores could afford costly exclusivity contracts with French fashion houses, Geraldine Stutz sent her buyers after smaller, unknown labels, bringing the designs of brands like Chloe, Valentino, and Fendi to the United States for the first time. Unlike haute couture clothing, which was made to order for specific customers, these pret-a-porter, or ready-to-wear, styles could be purchased in a variety of sizes and sold to any customer. Bendel’s Limited Edition department featured small collections of items sold in limited quantities, which frequently changed as buyers brought back new items from Europe. These rare pieces supported Geraldine’s goal of making exclusivity the heart of the Bendel experience.
In addition to her larger competitors, Geraldine also faced competition from boutique clothing stores, which were becoming popular with the increasingly wealthy teen and young adult market. Desperate to maintain Bendel’s reputation, Geraldine built boutiques for independent designers into the store and capitalized on the cultural obsession with youth to create a beauty department and the first Pilates studio beyond the one founded by Joseph Pilates. She also led the Bendel team to design and manufacture an in-house line of ready-to-wear clothing.
During the first five years of her presidency at Henri Bendel, Geraldine Stutz maintained a uniquely feminine air, sometimes holding meetings while getting pedicures. She repeatedly attributed her success to her understanding of female customers.
Part 3, Interlude 5 Summary: “Adel’s Mannequins”
In the late 1950s, South-African born prop designer Adel Rootstein revolutionized window displays when she built a fiberglass mannequin of a then-unknown young model who would soon become world-famous under the name Twiggy. Prior to Adel’s revolutionary use of plaster and fiberglass, mannequins were unwieldy statues that could weigh over 200 pounds, making them difficult to move and pose.
Mannequins have long played an important role in merchandising. From the Middle Ages onward, small dolls have been used to model clothing for potential buyers. When cheap glass production made storefronts a viable platform for advertising, merchants often used dress forms to display clothing. By the 1920s, most mannequins were made of canvas bodies and wax heads at risk of melting in brightly lit windows. Hortense Odlum of Bonwit Teller standardized life-like plaster mannequins after witnessing a headless bride in a store display. The combination of canvas bodies with plaster heads and arms gave mannequins a more life-like appeal.
Following her success with the fiberglass Twiggy model, Adel designed a series of inclusive mannequins, including the first mannequin based on a Black model and plus-size mannequins used to advertise push-up bras. Meanwhile, Henri Bendel ordered extra-thin mannequins. Adel also created models with visible nipples, which Bendel bought to display translucent shirts. Adel Rootstein continued to build mannequins for specialty boutiques until 1990, two years before her death.
Part 2, Chapter 10-Part 3, Interlude 5 Analysis
This section of When Women Ran Fifth Avenue highlights Satow’s thematic interest in The Mutual Influence of Fashion and Technology. The mid-20th-century American economy was heavily influenced by the Second World War. The lead-up to the war saw heavy industrial manufacturing, while the post-war years brought prosperity to returning soldiers and their families which inspired the creation of new products and markets. Satow’s history of department stores demonstrates the subsequent influence of technologies developed to aid the war effort on department stores and the fashion industry as a whole. In Chapter 10, Satow describes how Geraldine Stutz used military technologies to improve the lives of her employees. Following her remodel of Henri Bendel, the staff kitchen “included a peeler that peeled fifty pounds of potatoes and an electric mixer that mixed a hundred quarts of mashed potatoes,” a stove that “prepared three hundred chickens at one time, and a seven-shelf baking oven baked a hundred cakes” (224). The emphasis on numbers in these passages presents the Henri Bendel staff as a veritable army requiring industrial equipment to function, highlighting the incorporation of wartime technology into American commercial enterprises.
Satow places particular emphasis on the use of materials innovated for military use during the war—such as fiberglass and plastic—in mannequins for department store window displays. During the Second World War, “a firm that had been making plastic hands for wounded servicemen was asked to make a full-sized plastic man” that could be “dropped by parachute into the eye of the Bikini atomic-test explosion” (260). When the dummy survived the blast, manufacturing executives “figured plastic that didn’t melt in atom blasts could certainly survive hot department store windows,” and attempted to market them to department stores. However, these fiberglass and plastic mannequins were not widely accepted in the industry until Adel Rootstein designed a fiberglass and plastic mannequin using the supermodel Twiggy as the basis for the design. Like Geraldine Stutz, Adel Rootstein adapted military technology to meet a specific need within the fashion industry—a concrete example of mutual influence that underscores the book’s thematic interest in The Benefits of Women in Leadership.
Satow provides additional examples of technologies that helped to shape the fashion industry in the mid-20th century to reinforce her argument. In Chapter 10, Satow describes how Geraldine Stutz used new technologies to transform Henri Bendel in order to appeal to a new generation of shoppers. After the remodel, the store’s main floor featured “water falling from the fountain, a soundtrack of popular music piped through speakers, and an atomizer that released a fresh, citrusy aroma into the air every fifteen seconds” (210). The multisensory nature of the details in this passage reflects the dramatic influence of technological advances on all aspects of life in the mid-twentieth century. Geraldine’s intentional use of technology in her remodel of Henri Bendel reflects the mutual influence of fashion and technology.
Although the focus of When Women Ran Fifth Avenue is the way department stores empowered women and The Changing Roles of Women in 20th-Century America, this section of the book also acknowledges the ways in which the fashion industry remained exclusionary. In particular, Geraldine’s tenure at Henri Bendel was defined by a “rigorously enforced […] strict regime at the store that weeded out customers who weren’t thin” (216). Geraldine referred to the Bendel look as “‘dog whistle’ fashion […] clothes with a pitch so high and special that only the thinnest and most sophisticated women would hear their call” (216). These passages reflect an exclusionary ethos that aimed to ostracize all but wealthy, thin women.
