Henri Bendel and the Death of Luxury

NEW YORK — The last time I went to Henri Bendel on Fifth Avenue, I bought a short-cropped jacket made of rabbit fur, dyed lavender, from the British designer Matthew Williamson, who would go on to dress the duchess of Cambridge and become the creative director of Pucci.

That had to have been at least 12 or 13 years ago, before middle age dictated its own spending protocols. And yet even if I had remained the sort of person for whom a pastel fur bolero from a fashion prodigy seemed as necessary as breakfast or dish soap, Bendel’s would have been unable to accommodate me.

The precise moment of decline is hard to pinpoint. Bendel’s stopped selling clothes in 2009, but an aversion to the kind of experimentation and creativity — distinguished by the imprimatur of Andy Warhol, Stephen Burrows and Perry Ellis early in their careers — that had defined the store for decades took hold earlier.

For years now, Bendel’s has been filled with the sorts of things — costume jewelry, tote bags, fanny packs, scented candles — that the closet organizer you find on Yelp is going to gently tell you to throw away. This transition amounted, in a sense, to the philosophy of planned obsolescence taken to a self-annhiliating extreme: Bendel’s was selling you things you would eventually get rid of without offering anything you would be inclined to replace them with.

The recent news that the flagship store, and its 23 branches around the country, would close in January, after 123 years, suggested that the familiar Manhattan narrative of untenable commercial rents was again unfolding. But Bendel’s was paying comparatively little, $75 a square foot on average for 80,000 square feet spanning six floors, in one of the most expensive retail corridors in the world, where ground-floor space often goes for more than 45 times that and where any new occupant of the building is likely to pay upward of $300 a square foot.

Bendel’s will cease to exist because its holding company, L Brands, run by Leslie Wexner, has chosen to focus on the bigger retail outlets it owns (Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works), which are not dependent on the tastes of the affluent and retain a greater potential for real profitability.

Although it may be hard to sympathize with the deprivations of the inordinately wealthy, it is every bit as discordant to see midmarket retail chains flanking Billionaire’s Row as it is to observe drugstore after drugstore in parts of the city that still adhere to bohemian self-characterization.

Neighborhoods are not serving the people who live in them across a wide spectrum. If you moved into a $40 million apartment somewhere on 57th Street today, would you really want to walk over to Bendel’s and buy an “Influencer” handbag strap for $128? You are the “influencer,” of course, and you have a lot more money to spend, money you are unlikely to part with at Hollister (at Fifth Avenue near 53rd Street), where 15-year-olds are buying $29 jean leggings.

The ironies seem to ever multiply. One57, perhaps the best known of the stupendously expensive residences in the area, markets its location. Its website used to call attention to its proximity to Rizzoli and the rarefied books it sold. But Rizzoli is no longer there, having moved downtown.

Polo announced in 2017 that it was leaving Fifth Avenue. Madison Avenue now famously has its empty storefronts. When I returned to the website for One57 this week, I noticed that it now mentions Arche, the entirely unglamorous maker of flexible shoes, which are easily purchased on Zappos.

In 2003, at the outset of his mayoralty, Michael Bloomberg said that the city ought to regard itself as ‘'a luxury product.” Speaking at an economic conference, he continued: “If New York City is a business, it isn’t Walmart — it isn’t trying to be the lowest-priced product in the market.”

But Walmart is what the city’s retail culture has come to feel like. The city that has put so much effort into courting the wealthiest people on earth — trashing soul, artistry, vibrant chaos and originality in the process — now offers them less in the way of a certain kind of luxury experience. The increased corporatization of high-end fashion, the incursions of private equity, with its demands for bigger and bigger profit margins, share blame for the current state of affairs, along with the other more commonly discussed culprits. (In 2017, Neiman Marcus, which is coming to Hudson Yards, held $5 billion in debt that it had amassed through a decade of private-equity ownership.)

There are very few models in New York anymore for what Henri Bendel was. The Armoury, an extremely specialized — and quite small — menswear store in an area of Tribeca with little foot traffic, is one of the few examples I can think of.

Recently, I called Mark Cho, one of the store’s owners and founders, who formerly worked in distressed-real-estate assets in China and hated it, and asked him how he has managed to succeed. First, he bypassed the issue of escalating rent by buying the store’s space at a good price several years ago. Second, he put people on the sales floor with a deep level of knowledge about what it carried. The salespeople are also the buyers for the store.

A huge business could not function that way. “For some of the luxury brands, the customer comes in and knows exactly what he wants, and the salesperson is just a vending machine,” Cho told me. “The Armoury has no aspiration to be a big brand.”

Contained ambition, so anathema to the spirit of New York, is one answer, in the end.