Before there was Bergdorf Blondes, there was Betty Halbreich, the most famous personal shopper in the industry. The trimmed, white-haired and always well-rested Halbreich, that one Fashion someone described as “a bright-eyed fashion professional” who became something of a New York institution has died at the age of 96.
For more than four decades, Halbreich headed Bergdorf’s Solutions, a division she founded in 1976 at the behest of Ira Neimark and Dawn Mello. In 1978, Fashion It was then reported that the idea of a ‘women-focused shopping program’ was catching on. It certainly reflected the times; As more women entered the workforce, they not only had new situations to shop for, but also had less time to do so.
Known for her ‘peppery candor’, such as The New Yorker In short, the stylish and smart Halbreich, née Stoll, was born in Chicago and moved to New York in 1947 after marrying a man in the clothing industry. Halbreich worked on Seventh Avenue and for Geoffrey Beene’s distribution line before the collapse of her marriage, which she recounted in Fashionled to a stay in “a psychiatric hospital. A year after I recovered, Bergdorf Goodman opened a Geoffrey Beene boutique, and because of my experience with him, the store hired me to run the store.
A year later, she was asked to work one-on-one with individual and professional clients after passing an “entrance exam,” successfully selling to society swan Babe Paley. Halbreich would work with soap operas and TV series, among other things Sex and the city (with Patricia Veld) and Gossip girl (with Eric Daman), and was in front of the camera in the 2013 documentary about the iconic department store Scatter my ashes at Bergdorf Goodman.