As word spread that the specialty store Peress of Madison Avenue was closing, fans came to pay homage — and stock up on the beloved shop’s selection of mostly European lingerie, robes, socks, nightgowns, pajamas and slippers at 50 percent off.
For weeks ahead of the rumored Aug. 15 closing date, a line stretched outside the boutique. A sign on the door read: “Only one customer at a time and 10 min only.”
“My heart broke already,” said a woman who asked not to be named but was wearing white Hermès Oran sandals and had a waffle-knit bathrobe she was trying on as she browsed the store.
“Everybody was crying because we have to go,” Bibi, the longtime shopkeeper said in her Romanian accent. “Every single customer, they regret we are closing the store.”
“Bibi is very protective of the store,” said Herbert Peress, who has run the store since 1977. “Very respectful. And she’s working for me right now, closing down the business.” (It was also Bibi who handled the lingerie sales for women. “I sort of avoided it,” he said.)
“When I told her, ‘Bibi, I’m closing the business,’ she was crying,” Mr. Peress said. “I was crying. But it was time. My closest cousin and I were negotiating with the landlord. And I say, ‘Mike, you know what? I’m 88. I’m going to die in the business. I got to enjoy my life a little bit.’”
Mr. Peress was not present at the store for its final days and was instead seated in a wheelchair at a facility for rehabilitation and nursing care on the Upper East Side.
The paternal side of his family, who were Iraqi Jewish immigrants, opened their first store on Kingsbridge Road in the Bronx in the late 1920s. His mother, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, came in to buy silk stockings. “And eventually they ran,” Mr. Peress said. “So she went back to the store — this is how my parents met — and she says to him, ‘Would you repair them for me?’ He says, ‘Yes, I’ll repair.’ This is the origin of the Peress family.”
They married in 1928 or 1929 — Mr. Peress couldn’t recall exactly — and his brother was born in 1930, then he was born in 1936.
The Peress store, meanwhile, moved from the Bronx to Washington Heights in 1934, and then to East 64th Street and Madison Avenue in 1955.
“They knew there’s a different clientele, a little more upscale,” Mr. Peress said. They took over a former dry cleaner and paid about $500 per month in rent. The landlady was Dorothy Schiff, who was the owner and then publisher of The New York Post.
There they built up a following of regular people and superstars. They kept a guest book until the early 1960s that included signatures from Joan Crawford and “Mrs. Eugene O’Neill at the Lowell Hotel.” Liberace signed it, complete with a drawing of a piano and the work “love!”
Customers included socially ambitious women of many decades, such as Mariella Agnelli, Brooke Astor, Lily Auchincloss, Betsy Bloomingdale, Gloria Vanderbilt and Nan Kempner. There were media personalities like Nora Ephron, Katharine Graham, Diana Vreeland, Barbara Walters. Celebrities like Andy Warhol, Warren Beatty, Mary Tyler Moore, Bill Murray, Madonna, Cicely Tyson. There was the Schnabel family: Julian Schnabel, Lola Schnabel, Stella Schnabel. And the Kennedys: Caroline Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy and Lee Radziwill.
Mr. Peress was not always directly involved in the family business. He worked various engineering jobs in California and Washington, D.C., including for the Library of Congress, in the infancy of the computer. In the 1970s, his mother asked him to join her before she retired.
“And I did because in my blood was this business, and I finally found myself,” he said. “It took me a few years to, but I thrived in it and I grew in it.”
In 2000, after the Peress store had been on East 64th Street for about 45 years, the building had sold, and the current landlord said their lease would not be renewed. Chanel moved in and still occupies the space.
The Peress store moved farther up Madison Avenue, taking over a former Hungarian bakery near East 78th Street. When that building was sold, it moved to its current location on Madison and East 81st Street.
Its fans are still processing that the store will soon be vacant.
The illustrator Joana Avillez posted to Instagram, “Peress per sempre” with a photo of herself in gold slippers and a quilted bed jacket.
Becky Malinsky, a stylist and fashion newsletter writer, shopped for silk slips and Zimmerli underwear as she narrated her own history with the shop, where she has been buying tank tops, flannel robes and cotton nightgowns since 2017 or 2018. “My family had small independent shoe stores when I was growing up and I love shop life,” she said. “When my mom came to stay after I had my son, I got her hooked.”
Mr. Peress understood that the story of his store was the story of retail in New York City, that its closing represented an end of a chapter and a new kind of gentrification. “Corporate is buying, I think — no, renting — 81st and Madison for a much larger rent than we are paying.”
At that point he covered his eyes and started to cry. “They say, you can’t fall in love with your business,” he said. “But I did.”
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