Stylish Shopping: Bloomingdale's

59th and Lexington, NYC

The New York Times just ran a feature in its Styles section on Bloomingdale's, the fabled New York department store. Celebrating its 150th anniversary, Bloomingdale's if anything is a survivor. So many New York stores have vanished over time, and I suspect Bloomingdale's better days may be behind it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/style/bloomingdales-150-years.html?searchResultPosition=1

The piece is a tribute to Bloomingdale's from fashion's movers and shakers. It could easily become a book. But what about the rest of us? Scratch any woman who has shopped in New York as far back as you can find one and you will uncover memories of Bloomingdale's.

Right this way...

I would go there despite, in the beginning, being able to afford nothing. When I moved from Cleveland after college in 1964 I thought NYC stopped at 57th Street. The upper east side was a revelation. Home then became a studio apartment on 82nd and Lexington. My bed was a hollow door on 4 chrome legs with a thick piece of foam for a mattress. There was a place that sold them, the Door Store.

I would stop into Bloomingdale's on my walks home from work and on weekends. Everyone loved Bloomingdale's. Since we all were starting up apartments, the room settings were like catnip. Some of my friends who managed to bring home a living wage actually shopped there. And we didn't call it "Bloomie's", either. Bloomingdale's was and always will be just that. 

'70s Bloomingdale model rooms by Barbara D'Arcy

Church mice may have had better furniture than me, but I tricked myself into thinking I was gathering "inspiration". Of course I did really, really want one of those impractical leather chaises or a giant urn of peacock feathers. Although the rooms themselves are a blur, I could have lived in any one, surrounded by piles of pillows, ferns and animal hide rugs.

The most overarching memory is of eucalyptus. I could never figure out why that particular floor (the fifth I think) smelled so strongly of it until someone explained the old radiators used eucalyptus oil. To this day I will sniff a bunch of it and be transported. 

I would sometimes make myself a little sick, feeling certain I would never be able to buy a thing. Flash forward: I now have so much "stuff" I don't know what to do with it, despite regular purges and paring-downs. The door bed is long gone as are the peacock feathers.

The famous brown bag

 
My greatest Bloomingdale's memory also took place in the early days but involved apparel. I was a junior staffer on Glamour magazine. One day the editor-in-chief, Kathleen Casey Johnson, stopped by my desk to ask about my outfit. I was wearing a two-piece Banlon leopard print number that cost $10 in Bloomingdale's basement store. They had one then. She marched me into the fashion department and paraded me before the editors, saying, "Now if SHE could find this for $10 there's no reason you can't bring me clothes that cost less than the ones you're showing me." I'm not sure how the editors felt about this moment, but I loved it.