Earlier than there have been Bergdorf Blondes, there was Betty Halbreich, the business’s most well-known private shopper. The trim, white-haired, and all the time nicely accessorized Halbreich, who Vogue one described as “a clear-eyed trend professional,”and who grew to become one thing of a New York Establishment, has died, age 96.
For over 4 many years Halbreich was the top of Bergdorf’s Options, a division she began in 1976 on the behest of Ira Neimark and Daybreak Mello. By 1978, Vogue then reported, the thought of an “aimed-at-women buying program,” was catching on. Actually it mirrored the occasions; as extra girls entered the workforce, not solely did they’ve new conditions to buy, they’d much less time to take action.
Recognized for her “peppery candor,” as The New Yorker put it, the fashionable and savvy Halbreich, née Stoll, was born in Chicago and moved to New York in 1947, after marrying a person within the garment business. Halbreich labored on Seventh Avenue and for Geoffrey Beene’s diffusion line earlier than the collapse of her marriage,which she associated in Vogue, led to a keep in “a psychiatric hospital. A yr after I recovered, Bergdorf Goodman opened a Geoffrey Beene boutique, and due to my expertise with him, the shop employed me to come back in and run it.”
A yr later she was tapped to work one-on-one with particular person {and professional} purchasers after passing an “entrance examination,” efficiently promoting to Babe Paley, a society swan. Halbreich would go on to work with cleaning soap operas and TV collection together with Intercourse and the Metropolis (with Patricia Discipline) and Gossip Woman (with Eric Daman), and sat in entrance of the digicam within the 2013 documentary on the long-lasting division retailer Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf Goodman.
