We all love a sale. Whether you’re snapping up school uniform shirts from M&S or getting £8,400 off a Balmain mini dress at Harrods, the thrill of a bargain is always exciting.
But how many of us know that the concept of the seasonal sale was the brainchild of a Jewish businessman, Henri Bendel, who founded his eponymous Manhattan store in 1895.
His shop was “the zeitgeist of New York”, says New York jeweller Jade Trau, who used to shop there once a month with her mother and grandmother from the late 1980s until it closed in 2019.
The store “had a great energy. And there was stuff you didn’t see everywhere else, different from other department stores. It had this sparkly and old-world feeling,” she says.
A Bendel hat box. (Photo: Bendel press office)
The distinctive brown and cream-striped shopping bags, designed by Bendel, were as sought after as the clothes and accessories that were carefully wrapped inside. “There was something about walking out [with these bags] that felt extremely satisfying,” says Trau. Unlike Bloomingdale’s little brown shopper, a Bendel bag “was a much more elevated bag. It was glossy,” she says.
They were collectible trophies. Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw showed off her style cred by sporting a smart Henri Bendel hat box as she sashayed along the New York streets while fashionable Friend Rachel Green, played by Jennifer Aniston, went for Henri Bendel extras, carrying them in tiny striped totes.
This week, a book called Henri Bendel And The Worlds He Fashioned by Tim Allis is published, revealing the little-known life story of the man behind the iconic store.
Cover of Henri Bendel And The Worlds He Fashioned by Tim Allis. (Photo: Bendel press office)
Born in 1868 in Vermilionville, now Lafayette, in Louisiana in America’s Deep South, Bendel was one of seven children. His parents met in New Orleans, having emigrated from different European countries. His father, William Louis Bendel, came from Vienna while his mother, Mary Plonsky, was born in the Prussian town of Golub, now Golub-Dobrzyń in north-central Poland.
They moved to Vermilionville to be close to her sister and lived above their general merchandise store. Jewish people had been coming to the city since the early 1800s, with more following as the new railroad was built. Observant Jews, the family helped to establish the Lafayette synagogue, Rodeph Shalom, which was built in 1889, and still exists.
A postcard of Camelia Lodge, a house Bendel built in his native Louisiana. (Photo: Bendel press office)
When Bendel was six, his father died from appendicitis and his mother later re-married. She had another child, Emma Falk, later Levy, who eventually lived with Bendel with her two children in his swanky New York apartments including one along Park Avenue as well as in sprawling mansions on Long Island and in Connecticut. Bendel was the children’s guardian.
As a young boy, Bendel veered towards fashion, sewing dresses for his four sisters, making hats and finding a taste for fine fabrics. He also developed his entrepreneurial flair, helping in the family business, which grew to include clothes, furniture as well as an opera house.
Leaving home at 16, with $1,500 from his mother ($43,000 in today’s money), Bendel clerked in plantation stores in Louisiana. “You were out in the middle of the country so [a plantation store] would have provided one-stop shopping for basic goods and groceries for anyone living on the plantation in any capacity,” says Allis.
He later bought his own general store with a friend, adding hats to the roster of items for sale. They called the store Henri Bendel & Co Props, signalling that his fashion credentials were taking shape.
Falk's store in Lafayette, Louisiana, where Bendel's retail career began. (Photo: Bendel press office)
Through a friend, he met New Yorker Blanche Lehman and married her in 1894, moving into her mother’s Manhattan brownstone home. His wife sadly died the following year.
The year 1896 was a watershed for Bendel, says Allis. Wanting independence from his in-laws, he set up a millinery business with importer, Julius Saur. Bendel & Saur sold feathers and other trims in one shop on Ninth Street near Broadway and handmade hats in another shop nearby.
By the following year, the business was renamed Henri Bendel. At the same time, he also became a junior buyer for luxury department store B. Altman, which involved fashion trips to Paris. Luckily his upbringing in Louisiana meant he spoke fluent French. In Paris he met long-term companion John Blish, who later worked for him.
A general view of atmosphere at the Henri Bendel Holiday Window Unveiling at Henri Bendel in 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Henri Bendel)
In 1900, Bendel dissolved his business with Saur and six years later took a long lease for a five-storey townhouse along Fifth Avenue where he could fulfil his wider ambitions and sell fashion, fur and accessories as well as hats. To mark the milestone, he created the fabled brown and cream stripes as the store’s visual signature, from the entrance awning to the bags.
Clients such as soprano Geraldine Farrar wandered around the opulent store with its Louis XVI-style furniture, ladies’ retiring room and live music. One of his hired organists, Abraham Beekman Bastedo, became another long-term companion, a vice president of the company and its president after Bendel’s death. Bendel even converted to the Episcopal Church that Bastedo belonged to although, according to Allis, “he didn’t turn his back on his Jewish roots…and [remained] part of who he was”.
Henri Bendel (right) with his store's vice president, Abraham Bastedo. (Bendel press office)
Allis spent 15 years researching the book, but found scant information about him, no letters, diary or memoir. Instead he talked to around 40 of Bendel’s descendants for stories from grandparents or parents and looked through historic artefacts including photos from family weddings and bar mitzvahs, Bendel’s syndicated columns of fashion tips and business archives.
Allis believes Bendel gave some of his personality away in those syndicated newspaper columns. “Some of his fussiness came through in the columns. Some of his wagging his finger at new trends even as he was making money off them,” he says.
“He was very affable and could be amusing… (but) had a conservative streak,” says Allis, and he had a “colourful, piquant, pithy voice”.
Consider his blunt advice to 1920s flappers and bright young things that sheath gowns are a no-no. He wrote in 1925: “The slender waistline is much too lovely a line not to be emphasised. Nothing is more attractive for youth than the bouffant frock with its molded bodice and full wide skirts.”
A sketch by French designer Erté, who made clothes for Bendel's store. (Photo: Bendel press office)
Bendel’s new store changed the way women shopped as he bagged a licence to copy Paris couture, thus bringing to New York designs by Chanel, Lanvin and other names to New York, and modifying them for the wealthy American woman, according to Patrick Michael Hughes, associate teaching professor at Parsons School of Design in New York. “They were custom-made so you almost had that couture experience, but you didn’t have to go to Paris,” says Hughes. Bendel was awarded a Legion of Honour for this support of French fashion in 1933.
His Parisian strategy allowed Bendel to become a top-tier retailer alongside Bergdorf Goodman, another New York store since 1899 run by a Jewish businessman, Erwin Goodman. Bloomingdale’s, run by Jewish brothers Joseph and Lyman Bloomingdale since 1872, was “a step down from Bendel’s…because Bloomingdale’s was not about custom clothing, but really wonderful ready-to-wear labels,” says Hughes.
Actress Isla Fisher carrying Bendel shopping bags in the 2009 film"Confessions of a Shopaholic". (Photo: Alamy)
Then there was another Jewish entrepreneur, Barney Pressman, who founded Barney’s in 1923, who “was against that elitist kind of client”, says Hughes. “What Barney Pressman used to do was buy all of the stuff that wasn’t selling from some stores or designers. Take out the label. Put in his own label. And that’s how Barney’s really got going,” says Hughes. “It was nowhere near Fifth Avenue. It was downtown,” he adds.
By 1913, Bendel moved to a bigger space on West 57th Street, where the store stayed until 1985. Bridalwear was added and so were in-store runway shows. The décor was more ornate too, with a sweeping staircase greeting customers such as actresses Lillian Gish and Tallulah Bankhead. Bendel also designed costumes for the theatre.
Actress Lilian Gish in a Bendel gown. (Photo: Bendel press office)
Trading during the First World War was tough as rationing, shortages and rising costs meant some women reined in their spending, and then the 1929 Wall Street Crash and subsequent depression didn’t help. But ever the optimist, Bendel added gloves, scarves and hosiery departments as well as ready-to-wear, with even the well-heeled wanting cheaper items. By 1933, the company’s capital stock plunged from $3,650,000 to $715,000, but two years later he managed to turn the company’s fortunes around.
He died of a sudden heart attack in his Park Avenue apartment in March 1936, leaving an estate worth $1.2 million and he was buried in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, Westchester County in New York State
His brand lived on for another 83 years. His New York store moved back to Fifth Avenue in 1985 and shut its doors for good in January 2019.
Lamenting the store’s closure, one American fashionista lamented that as a kid she “even had my room painted with your stripes”.
Henri Bendel And The Worlds He Fashioned by Tim Allis is published by University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, £27.64. Available on Amazon UK from September 24
