Review | Celebrating the glamorous heyday of the department store

This is not to say shopping is an act of artistic expression — though some might argue that it is — but it has merits. The hunt is a form of narrativizing: To shop is to imagine yourself as someone else, or you but better. On the page, shopping is leisure, pleasure, refuge and, as the saying goes, therapy. It also used to be a more luxurious, perhaps even respected act.

The latest example of great shopping writing is nonfiction: Julie Satow’s charming “When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion,” which traces the stories of three influential women in the history of 20th-century department stores: Hortense Odlum’s leadership of Bonwit Teller during the Depression and into the 1940s; Dorothy Shaver’s reinvention of Lord & Taylor between the 1930s and late ’50s; and, in the decades following, the creation of the specialty boutique under Geraldine Stutz.

Compelling as their stories are, the book is just as appealing for the details of the bygone wonder that was the mid-century department store. Reading about these too-good-to-be-true spaces feels a bit like reading about the Titanic — freighted as it was with thousands of pounds of bread, a lounge modeled on Versailles and a gym with an electric “camel,” it’s no wonder the thing sank. In the mid-1920s, Lord & Taylor had its own couture salon, a sunroom, a breakfast room and a library. The roof of one now-defunct San Francisco department store had a 70-foot reproduction of the Eiffel Tower. Bonwit Teller piped out air conditioning. A suburban Philadelphia Lord & Taylor had a shop for women under 5-foot-4 (called 54 Shop), one of the first maternity-wear departments and its own Hermes store. Bendel’s sold a houndstooth-covered crossword dictionary, stationery paper embellished with pressed flowers and a $22,000 belt (in the 1960s!) made from a crushed-emerald horse bridle that a Bendel’s employee discovered when a maharajah paddled up to her while canoeing in Kashmir. Joseph Pilates opened his first branch location there, where he taught every morning before heading to his own business. “Important people go into that store,” he said — and he was right: Princess Grace, Lee Radziwill, the Duchess of Windsor.

Convinced that top-notch service was key to their success, department stores offered their employees handsome salaries and often provided their staff with in-house health care and even resorts. They could take free courses in interior design and merchandising at New York University. The stores were, Satow posits in several compelling ways, a way for women to get ahead when few professional avenues were available to them.

The most marvelous feature of all: Any item from Marshall Field’s could be returned at any time for a full refund. Anyone who’s disillusioned by the way efficiency has displaced true luxury — not to mention quality, service and choice — will swoon. Who cares if I can get my new hair dryer delivered tomorrow? Wouldn’t you rather have windows featuring a mannequin having a nervous breakdown in the latest Jean Muir designs?!

Satow could have focused on the stores alone, with their array of delightful bygone details. But by following Odlum, Shaver and Stutz, she posits that women, in shaping retail, invented the American fashion industry. While couture can be traced to Marie Antoinette’s days — and fashion as a commercialized art form insisting on its own importance is a French export — it was Odlum, Shaver and Stutz, navigating commerce leading up to and following World War II, who cultivated American fashion as its own special animal.

In Satow’s reckoning, they invented a lot: The makeover. Personal shopping. American art deco. Something called “the American Look,” which is clearly the genesis of preppy clothes. The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show! The Met Gala! While some of these claims seem less persuasive than others, her most significant assertions are powerful: When European clothes became less available or compelling to knock off, her protagonists rallied the American Garment District to up its standards and discovered names like Claire McCardell, who created distinctly American alternatives to then-rampant fussy French knockoffs that made the utilitarian beautiful; Donald Brooks, known for designs that were somehow simple and flashy; and Stephen Burrows, whose lettuce hem pieces were practically a uniform at Studio 54.

Much as it can be when one is ensorcelled by the seductive spell of a “Mad Men” episode, it is easy to ignore the brutality amid the mid-century gloss. (Such a great manicure! you might think, as Betty smokes her way through lung cancer.) The department store was a refuge, even escape, for many American women, not least Satow’s three retail ingénues. Odlum was coerced into taking over Bonwit Teller when her husband bought it, possibly to distract her from his affair with the woman who became his second wife. (The mistress began scheming in, of all places, a department store salon.) Odlum later disavowed her professional success: “The most beautiful career in the world is a home,” she said. For the others, it wasn’t: Stutz was diagnosed with cancer in her early 20s and was unable to have children. Shaver never married. Even as they ascended to the top of major corporations and made record salaries — Shaver was the highest-paid woman in American history in 1945, making $110,000 a year — they often could not escape scrutiny, even their own. And the worlds they built were largely forgotten, until Satow revived their legacies.

What eventually toppled these Shoppingra-las? In short, the post-World War II optimism that drove a need for goods gave way to a 1960s suburban sprawl and a glut of stuff that sapped the metropolitan temple of its power. In swooped the discount retailers — Walmart, Kmart — that made department stores look stuffy, expensive. There is more to it, of course — villains include Donald Trump, who dismantled Bonwit Teller to build Trump Tower; and Jeffrey’s Epstein’s most famous client, Leslie Wexner, who bought Bendel’s and sent in his dorkily dressed Ohioans to strip it of its magic. (You’ll never hear blue shirts described with such ire.)

What Satow doesn’t explore, though her writing is haunted by the topic like a well-dressed ghost, is the decline in American fashion. It’s not just American shopping that has lost some of its character, but clothing itself — and through the work these women did, it’s easy to see that the two are more entwined than we might have thought. If shopping were better, maybe clothing would be better, too.

That’s not to berate us all for shopping without literary mystique. Rather, what made these stores special is that the women designed these spaces for women. “Let’s be feminine and follow our hunches,” one Bonwit ad during Odlum’s tenure declared. “I listen constantly to what women want,” Shaver said. “Fashion says, ‘Me, too,’” Stutz said, “while style says, ‘Only me.’”

Rachel Tashjian is a fashion writer for The Washington Post’s Style section, covering fashion and style on the runway, red carpet and street, and in the media and politics.

When Women Ran Fifth Avenue

Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion

Doubleday. 294 pp. $32.50