When women ran Fifth Avenue Glamour and power at the dawn of American fashion

Journalist Satow (The Plaza, 2019) foregrounds three women in this group biography, all of whom influenced the apparel industry in America by managing some of midcentury New York City's biggest department stores. Dorothy Shaver, of Lord & Taylor, quickly saw the possibilities of blending art and commerce, making department stores "cultural arbiters." Hortense Odlum, of Bonwit Teller, had been a suburban housewife and was charged with attracting upper-middle-class shoppers like herself; within years, she was running the company. Geraldine Stutz, the head of Henri Bendel, influenced the fashion industry with her sense of style, cultivating designers and setting trends through the 1970s. Satow briefly traces the evolution of the Garment District from mid-nineteenth-century sweatshops through the 1940s, which saw the heyday of the window display, evocative tableaux that inspired impulse purchases--what became known as window shopping. While retail was a path to career advancement for white women, Black women, who were rarely hired for the sales floor, toiled in the kitchens and stock rooms. Satow's narrative is recommended as an interesting piece of social history, especially as department stores have been obsolesced by online shopping.

TFashion narratives often center male European designers, but New York Times contributor Satow (The Plaza: The Secret Life of America's Most Famous Hotel) tells a different story in her compact and compelling history of the American department store as a uniquely woman-centered realm, distilled through the careers of Hortense Odlum at Bonwit Teller, Dorothy Shaver at Lord & Taylor, and Geraldine Stutz at Henri Bendel. Satow shows department stores as equalizing spaces for talented women to find careers outside their homes, though her three protagonists struggle to balance roles as leaders of their companies against society's expectations of them. Sidebars on Maggie Walker establishing St. Luke Emporium for Black shoppers, Elizabeth Hawes surreptitiously sketching Paris runways, Adel Rootstein creating modern mannequins, and other short takes expand the story. Satow concludes with perhaps excessive optimism about the democratizing nature of online retail and the expanded career options open to women today. VERDICT A fascinating journalistic study of three pioneering women in the changing retail landscape of the 20th-century United States. Shoppers who've been surfing Amazon in sweatpants since the pandemic began might look back on the eras of Odlum, Shaver, and Stutz with nostalgia.--Lindsay King

An investigation into three women who oversaw New York City department stores between the 1920s and 1970s. "In the early twentieth century, department stores were a land of glamour and possibility," writes Satow, author of The Plaza. By the 1920s, the majority of sales staffs in such stores were women, while supervisors were mostly men, who "treated their female underlings with condescension and paternalism. At Filene's, for instance, saleswomen were required to refer to male bosses as 'dad.'" The author focuses on three women--Hortense Odlum, Dorothy Shaver, and Geraldine Stutz--each of whom, against overwhelming odds, came to lead a different Manhattan department store. Organized chronologically in three parts, the book refers to each woman by her first name and includes chapter titles like "Fashion Is Spinach," "Hortense Goes Shopping," and "Dorothy's American Look." In 1924, when she was 33, Dorothy started at Lord & Taylor in the comparison-shopping department. By her second year, she oversaw fashions and interior decorations; the following year, she was appointed to the board of directors, almost unheard of for a woman. In 1928, she curated the largest collection of Art Deco furnishings ever exhibited in the country. "Dorothy's efforts blurred the lines between art and commerce….She proved that department stores could rival galleries, and even museums, as cultural arbiters." In 1945, "steely-eyed" Dorothy was named Lord & Taylor's president. A decade earlier, meanwhile, despite never having held a job, Hortense, a suburban wife and mother, was hired at now-defunct Bonwit Teller. Within a year, she ran the store, serving as its president between 1934 to 1940. Subsequently, in 1957, "theatrical and brilliant" Geraldine, a former fashion editor at Glamour, took the helm of Henri Bendel, which she ran, with great aplomb, through the 1970s. The illuminating stories of these unexpected tastemakers are both complementary and well contextualized. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.