Dress for Less

Whenever my mother sought to lift me out of my adolescent blues, she’d take me shopping— invariably to one of New York’s now-defunct designer discount stores, where she treated me to the best American fashion we could afford. At our favorite discounter S&W’s long-gone Manhattan branch, my mother would cheer me up with Albert Nippon dresses, Harve Benard suits, and even an authentic Harris tweed blazer with suede elbow patches.

In her new book, The Empresses of Seventh Avenue: World War II, New York City, and the Birth of American Fashion, historian and journalist Nancy MacDonell offers the story behind those clothes, and the people who made them. The midwives to this birth were the women MacDonell calls the “empresses”: designer Clare McCardell, who invented comfortable and effortlessly chic American style; Lord & Taylor department store president Dorothy Shaver, who showcased it; and fashion editors Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland, and PR wiz and New York Fashion Week inventor Eleanor Lambert, who popularized it.

Surprisingly, none of them was Jewish, but they were backed by a formidable team of Jewish manufacturers, buyers, salesmen, and factory workers who interpreted their vision for the masses. Discounters like S&W operated in the shadows, allowing debt-strapped manufacturers to stay afloat by providing a market for the styles their upscale clients rejected.

Pioneering this business model was Loehmann’s founder Frieda Loehmann, for decades a familiar presence on Seventh Avenue, where she arrived dressed head to toe in black in the years when that color signaled widowhood rather than edginess. Wielding a thick wad of cash and a black shopping bag stuffed full of odd-lots samples and overstock, she made a fortune selling Seventh Avenue’s rejects to her outer-borough customers.

Loehmann was known for her fashion savvy; she could cannily predict trends. Though she counted designers such as Adele Simpon and Norman Norell as her friends, her store was more warehouse than atelier.

My mother loved to shop at the chain’s flagship store on Fordham Road in the Bronx, a long subway ride from our Upper West Side home. Loehmann’s in the Bronx was overwhelming; thousands of garments and accessories spread over three floors—the cheapest merchandise near the front, and at the far end of the store, my mother’s favorite department, the “Backroom,” stuffed with designer goodies.

Adding to the mystique was Loehmann’s marketing strategy: Though you knew the clothes were high end, you couldn’t quite tell because the labels were cut out. While shoppers claimed an ability to identify the garments by reading the cryptic garment tags, my mother did not. Relying instead on her own fashion sense, her eyes and fingers, she could reliably distinguish between schmattas, Yiddish for rags, and metziyas, Yiddish for finds, meaning real bargains. Finding a metziya could be life-altering. In a letter responding to a New York Times piece published upon Loehmann’s demise, an anonymous consumer recalled her thrill several decades earlier at scoring a Mollie Parnis to wear to a bar mitzvah—Parnis’ designs were famously worn by first ladies—for $7.

Even with its glittering stock, Loehmann’s never felt like Saks. The most low-end of the discounters was probably S. Klein on the Square, which an article published on the website Forgotten New York described as a “heartwarmingly decrepit firetrap.” Klein’s, which once occupied the intersection of Broadway and Fourth Avenue on Union Square, began in 1912 as a one-room retail dress shop, growing by the 1930s into the largest women’s wear retail store in the world. That wasn’t enough to convince the management to improve the store. Even during its heyday, when it sold $25 million worth of clothes, Klein’s lacked carpeting and even sales help; customers were left to choose dresses from the crude iron racks.

I remember Klein’s as a drab and crowded place where I was schlepped against my will as a young child. For my mother, however, the store was paradise after living in prewar Europe, where clothing was sewn by seamstresses—a long and often frustrating process. “Don’t think that the dresses came like you imagined they would,” was my mother’s evaluation. She fell in love with American ready-to-wear, especially at Klein’s almost-free prices. A 1946 Time magazine report described the store’s pricing strategy: “Many a $14 dollar dress found its way to Klein’s $7.95 rack and if it stayed there for more than two weeks it’s price was cut again, sometimes down to $1.”

A less appealing feature was the shared dressing rooms—females only—which could be noisy, crowded, and messy as customers scattered discarded items on the floor. Loehmann’s offered a “husband’s row,” chairs where men could sit while they waited for their wives and daughters to finish their try-ons; the other stores did not.

Shared dressing rooms had an upside; they provided camaraderie and education. I honed my fashion instincts at S&W’s communal try-on space, listening to fellow shoppers debating whether a garment was worthy of purchase.

Most importantly, the lack of frills kept prices low, which fueled my mother’s natural generosity. At the end of every season, she purged her closet of castoffs, still in excellent condition, and donated to deserving beneficiaries: either Raya, her Russian Jewish immigrant cleaning lady, or poor relatives in Israel. Meanwhile, in Mexico, where my mother had lived briefly before immigrating to the U.S., my mother’s friends—fellow survivors—went green with jealousy over her discount-store purchased Jackie O.-inspired dresses, which they claimed didn’t exist in their country. Aching for them, my mother left behind her entire travel wardrobe, returning home with an empty suitcase. As a child, I didn’t like watching my mother part with those dresses, but now I understand why she did. She was helping her friends to feel good about themselves. For my mother and her contemporaries, good clothing wasn’t a luxury —it was a means of expressing personal dignity, even Jewish pride.

Even during their hardscrabble prewar life, my mother and her contemporaries strived for elegance. “We may have been starving, but we always had a good dress,” was the way my mother’s cousin Helen Weiss, who grew up with her in interwar Romania, put it. This mindset existed throughout Jewish Europe, continuing into the Holocaust. In her research, Polish fashion anthropologist Karolina Sulej discovered that even inside the Warsaw Ghetto, Jewish women attempted to keep up with the styles.

My mother is gone now, as are the discount stores she once patronized. Following a long decline, Klein’s closed its doors in 1975. Loehmann’s in 2014. S&W still exists, but only in Brooklyn and Rockland County, catering mainly to a Hasidic clientele.

Nor is Seventh Avenue the manufacturing giant it once was. Today, clothing is made in the developing world. Garment center showrooms are used mainly for prototyping and sample production.

These days, a parent hoping to perk up a depressed teen through retail therapy will end up at a fast-fashion store where they will buy shoddy garments that will quickly end up in landfill, not much consolation to an aching heart. The stylish and durable fashions of the empress era are mostly gone now, as are the discounters who marketed them to budget-conscious shoppers.