He did not travel alone. His was a sprawling unorthodox household, consisting of his widowed half-sister, her two children, and two male companions—John Blish, who was over a decade his senior, and with whom Bendel once described as having “a lifelong intimate relationship,” and Abraham Bastado, 10 years younger. Bliss and Bastado were labeled in the press variously as servants, colleagues, and companions—but the truth was no doubt hiding in plain sight.
Allis does a fine job telling the story of this singular American, all the more impressive since he had so little to work with. Bendel left no diaries, wrote no memoir, there were not even letters. The author has pieced together this tale from snippets in the public record—newspaper clippings, various announcements, and the fading recollections of descendants.
Luckily, as scant as the personal documents are, the advertisements and magazine features are plentiful, and the book is lavishly illustrated. Here are the stars of the silent screen, celebrities like Billie Burke and Lillian Gish, accoutered in Bendel’s frocks; here are breathless descriptions of his increasingly sumptuous estates.
Alas, like so many retail stories, this one does not have a happy ending. Bendel passed away in 1936. At first his relatives kept the company afloat; then the business endured a series of owners. It had a burst of life when Geraldine Stutz arrived in 1957 and installed the famous Street of Shops, a series of boutiques that captured the insouciant spirit of the 1960s and ’70s, and introduced such designers as Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren, and Zandra Rhodes. But those glory days did not last. The store moved around the corner to Fifth Avenue in 1985, and the business closed permanently in 2019.
714 Fifth Avenue.Photo: Courtesy of Steven VanAuken
Was it purely a victim of its time? Can an enterprise built on refinement, that wears its uniqueness proudly on its cashmere sleeve, have any role in this modern world? “What I regret today,” Stutz once said, “is that there may be no Bendel’s for somebody to turn around as I turned around the old-time Bendel’s. Any name with the kind of reputation and history from the turn of the century as the store of style, not just fashion, deserves to survive.”
