Earlier than there have been Bergdorf Blondes, there was Betty Halbreich, the business’s most well-known private shopper. The trim, white-haired, and at all times effectively accessorized Halbreich, who Vogue one described as “a clear-eyed style 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 pinnacle 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 concept of an “aimed-at-women purchasing program,” was catching on. Definitely it mirrored the instances; 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 trendy 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 return in and run it.”
A yr later she was tapped to work one-on-one with particular person {and professional} shoppers 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 sequence together with Intercourse and the Metropolis (with Patricia Subject) and Gossip Lady (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.