Linda Dresner, the canny Midwestern retailer who introduced generations of well-to-do women to avant-garde fashion in gallery-like stores bearing her name on Park Avenue in Manhattan and in suburban Detroit — boutiques whose rigorous minimalism, much imitated, changed the way clothing was sold — died on March 30 at her home in Birmingham, Mich. She was 88.
Her granddaughter Lauren Lewis confirmed the death.
Ms. Dresner had been selling edgy European designers like Claude Montana for a few years in Birmingham, a northern suburb of Detroit, when she opened a store on Park Avenue in 1984. It was an architectural stunner, designed by J.W. Fred Smith: an audaciously spare, all-white space that confounded passers-by.
What was going on in there? Was it a gallery?
At Linda Dresner on Park Avenue, there was nothing in the window and not much in the interior beyond, except for a somber bronze table and behind it, an enormous, black backlit cube, like the inscrutable object from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“How will someone know I’m here?” Ms. Dresner wondered to Mr. Smith, as she told Interior Design magazine in 2009. Mr. Smith replied: “Someone who doesn’t want to come in is someone you don’t want to talk to.”
Jackie Onassis came, often with a tuna fish sandwich tucked into her purse. She liked to sneak away and eat her lunch in one of the store’s capacious dressing rooms, which were also soundproof. (“If you are deciding whether or not to buy an expensive dress,” Mr. Smith told Architectural Record in 1985, “you don’t want to hear another women’s problems.”)
Her sister, Lee Radziwill, came, too — and, in the next decade, her future daughter-in-law, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. Elaine Stritch, who bought only white blouses, was also a regular. So were various Tisches and other moneyed New Yorkers and, much later, the Olsen twins, the Miller sisters (a trio of 1990s-era society “it” girls) and Kim Cattrall, the sultry “Sex and the City” actress, who lived upstairs.
Together, Ms. Dresner and Mr. Smith had created a rarefied third place on an unlikely stretch of Park Avenue. Like Geraldine Stutz, the longtime president of Henri Bendel, Ms. Dresner had a flair for presentation and an eye and appetite for what was new in fashion — in the early days, that meant Japanese designers like Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, whose cerebral, gender-fluid clothes were not an easy sell to American women.
There wasn’t much on display in the glowing space behind that black cube. Bucking convention, Ms. Dresner mixed clothing from various designers — displaying pieces from Jil Sander, the minimalist German designer, with those by Jean Muir, the British classicist, for example. Her taste was eclectic and adventurous. In the 1990s, she carried Belgian designers like Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten. She also carried Romeo Gigli, Alaia, Sybilla, Jean Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler and, for a time, Prada, until she felt, as she said, “there was too much of it around.”
Her best marketing skill, Jessica Testa wrote in The New York Times in 2021, was her singular point of view.
The store’s luminous windows contributed to Manhattan’s street theater — in later years, you might see a single compelling garment, usually black, displayed on a dressmaker’s dummy placed in the center of that first room.
More important, it was terrific retail theater in an era when department stores like Bendel and Barneys New York and specialty stores like Ms. Dresner’s were destinations, filled with clothing that reflected the particular taste of their proprietors, rather than monolithic outlets for luxury brands.
And she knew her customers. Douglas Chen, a manager and buyer there, recalled “the pulls” — selections of garments assembled for regulars who visited the store. For those who couldn’t spare the time to visit, the selections were tucked into garment bags, often as many as a dozen at a time, and sent by taxi, along with a salesperson and a seamstress, to this or that townhouse on the Upper East Side.
“Linda was part of my education in fashion,” said Cathy Horyn, the former fashion critic of The New York Times, whose first job as a fashion reporter was at The Detroit News.
“She helped me gain confidence in what I was going to wear,” Ms. Horyn said. “But she also helped me understand how the clothes I might like as a writer might translate into real people’s lives. She was always a trusted source. After the shows, I would ask her, ‘What did you see? What did you love?’”
Linda Varkle was born on Dec. 8, 1937, in Detroit, one of three children of Idabell (Snitz) Varkle and Morris Varkle, who was in the scrap business. She was raised, as she once told the Detroit Free Press, to graduate from high school and become a bride, which she did, marrying Milford Lewis when she was 17.
In the early 1960s, she began modeling locally, and earning her own money for the first time. “It was the first independent step I’d ever taken,” she said.
In the mid-60s, she and a fellow model opened a small clothing store, Potpourri, in a Detroit suburb, and ran it together for five years. She co-owned another clothing store, Hattie’s, in a different suburb, with Hattie Belkin, a transplanted New Yorker, for much of the 1970s, until the pair had a falling out.
By then, she and Mr. Lewis had divorced, and she was remarried, to Milton Dresner, a builder. With his backing, she went out on her own, in a 700-square-foot store in Birmingham that Mr. Smith painted all black and furnished with hot-pink leather sofas. Because Ms. Belkin had exclusives with many of the European designers, Ms. Dresner had to look elsewhere for clothing, to countries like Japan. What with the black paint, the pink sofas and the weird clothes, Detroit’s ladies were often perplexed.
Ms. Dresner’s marriage to Mr. Dresner also ended in divorce. In addition to her granddaughter Lauren, she is survived by her husband, Edward C. Levy Jr.; two sons from her first marriage, Mark Lewis and Steven Lewis; three other grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and a sister, Tisha Roth.
Ms. Dresner closed her Manhattan store in 2008. Her lease was up, and the financial crisis was upending retail everywhere. She held onto her Birmingham store until 2021, when the decline of specialty stores like hers and high-end department stores like Barneys had become a countrywide rout.
“I think that we’re losing an independent idea of what retail should be,” she told The Times.
Ms. Sander, the German designer, said in an email that Ms. Dresner’s was one of the first stores in the U.S. to carry her clothing, and had been instrumental in her success: “She was a visionary and played an important and influential part in the golden age of retail.”
Ms. Dresner explained her talents this way: “I was good at items,” she said. “I was good at putting someone’s top with someone else’s pants and someone else’s jacket.”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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