Betty Halbreich, considered by genuine and aspiring grandes dames to be fashion’s leading personal shopper, who made the search for the right clothing a higher kind of quest — one for dignity, standards and self-knowledge — died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 96.
Her daughter, Kathy Halbreich, said she died of cancer in a hospital.
Ms. Halbreich was revered by those in the know and anonymous to everyone else. It took expertise, and perhaps a bit of gumption, even just to find her. One would enter the imposing white marble building that the Bergdorf Goodman department store has occupied since the Jazz Age; stride past the crystal chandeliers of the lobby; navigate to a narrow, nondescript hallway on the third floor; and proceed to the end of it.
There lay Betty Halbreich’s Solutions. It was a little cream-colored office with a stunning view of the Plaza Hotel and the Pulitzer Fountain but also some characteristics of a diner. A board pasted with photographs of regulars included a picture of Lena Dunham; a plastic box on the desk containing an odd trinket, a gun made of chocolate, was a gift from Joan Rivers.
Ms. Halbreich dressed a combination of New York’s matrons and debutantes, as well as tycoons like Estée Lauder, big shots’ wives like the former first lady Betty Ford, politicians like Dianne Feinstein, and actresses like Lauren Bacall and Meryl Streep. She worked closely with the stylists of movies, including “Broadway Danny Rose” (1984) and “Sophie’s Choice” (1982), and television shows, including the original “Gossip Girl” and “Sex and the City,” for which a single episode could require spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on clothes.
In her 80s, Ms. Halbreich transformed from a local secret for the rich and famous into a national figure: She was “the breakout star” of the 2013 documentary “Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s,” as The New York Times wrote. The next year, her memoir, “I’ll Drink to That: A Life in Style, With a Twist,” was widely and positively reviewed.
New York magazine profiled her as “the most famous personal shopper in the world.” The New Yorker titled its own profile more simply: “Ask Betty.”
She brought a certain hauteur to her role as self-identified “clerk.” She was a child of the staid German Jewish upper class. She lived in an eight-room, 12-closet Park Avenue apartment where the rent began, in 1947, at just $220 (she told The Times in 2013 that her landlord had been “very good to me”). Nevertheless, she discovered in middle age that she needed to work to support herself.
Anybody could book Ms. Halbreich’s time free of charge and without being required to make a purchase. She worked on salary and not commission, which liberated her from the incentive to upsell.
“As soon as the process of shopping became a commercial transaction, as opposed to a creative endeavor, I chilled to the whole enterprise,” she wrote in her memoir.
She was the rare salesperson to brag about persuading people not to buy something. In her memoir, she derided one client’s wish for a Chanel jacket as “insecure and costly” and recounted pushing back on the idea until the woman dropped it.
People frequently called Ms. Halbreich blunt. “You have a very expensive figure,” she once said to a client. “What is an expensive figure?” the client asked. “Too womanly to go jeune fille,” Ms. Halbreich replied.
Not everyone enjoyed the zingers — one “important buyer,” The New Yorker wrote, labeled Ms. Halbreich “a curmudgeon” — but her office nevertheless raked in annual sales in the range of two to three million dollars, and it attracted frequent visits from designers like Isaac Mizrahi and Michael Kors.
Her days always began with her “walking the store,” as she put it, scrutinizing each of Bergdorf’s seven floors of merchandise. In her memoir and in interviews, she enumerated ironclad rules:
“I don’t take the second wife if I’ve dressed the first one, and I don’t take the mistress.”
“You should love yourself in something immediately.”
“Never ‘that looks awful on you.’ Rather ‘the dress is awful.’”
“I will never leave one client to help another.”
“There is a cutoff period to my involvement, but with me at least one gets an hour or two.”
Ms. Halbreich generally insisted on being in the dressing room with her clients. Intimacy was the goal. When a client put something on, instead of looking in the mirror, she looked at Ms. Halbreich. In such moments, Ms. Halbreich wrote in her memoir, she could discern a woman’s “deep desires.”
One client muttered about husbands and their young girlfriends. Ms. Halbreich found clothes that made her look youthful and feminine. Some women confided that their husbands were dying. Ms. Halbreich found them special tabs that could be attached to zippers so they would be able one day get into dresses by themselves.
“Halbreich counsels powerful women at their most vulnerable moments,” The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2013.
Betty Ann Samuels was born in Chicago on Nov. 17, 1927. Her father, Morton Samuels, and her mother, Carol Freshman, quickly divorced. She was raised by her stepfather, Harry Stoll, who was president of the Chicago department store Mandel Brothers. Betty and her mother took his name.
Betty’s mother was known for her hats: In the snowy month of December, she wore a cloche covered in cherries. Betty, an only child, spent much of her girlhood alone in closets playing dress-up.
After Mr. Stoll died, Ms. Stoll opened a beloved Chicago bookstore.
Betty’s tenure at Colorado College ended after a devastating breakup. While visiting a Miami resort with her family, she was introduced to the hotelier’s son. He was six feet tall, athletic and sun-tanned. He drove a blue convertible with red leather seats. Betty thought he was the best-looking human being she had ever seen.
His name was Sonny Halbreich. They married in 1947, when Betty was 19, and moved to Manhattan.
Mr. Halbreich knew the secret entrance to use and which palms to grease to get a front table at the Copacabana. Ms. Halbreich spent much of her time setting the table for dinner parties.
Her husband, she soon learned, felt no compunction about flirting with other women right in front of her. Evidence of his affairs prompted her to pursue affairs of her own. She berated him; he responded with silence. She consoled herself by using his money to buy unaffordably beautiful clothes. He drank.
After Mr. Halbreich moved out, Ms. Halbreich slit her wrist — just a “brushstroke,” she wrote in her memoir — and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. She hoped Mr. Halbreich would “feel sorry” and come back. The plan did not work. Instead, she began seeing a therapist.
Friends set her up with jobs in fashion retail. She learned from a gentlemanly sales associate that it was possible to be honest and successful at the same time. One day in 1976, she ran into a friend who was with Ira Neimark, Bergdorf’s chief executive; he soon hired her as a saleswoman.
Though she avoided the cash register (she did not, she realized, like making sales), she found another sort of calling. “I just stood there and told people how to dress,” she told Women’s Wear Daily in 2014.
She asked Mr. Neimark if she could build a department around what she called “individual help.” After she passed a test run with the socialite Babe Paley, Mr. Neimark approved the idea.
In her 60s, she met Jim Dipple, who became her companion. He helped her ask for a raise and save for retirement. Yet, she wrote, Mr. Halbreich remained the love of her life. They never divorced.
Mr. Halbreich died in 2004, and Mr. Dipple died several years later. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Halbreich is survived by her son, John, and three grandchildren. She lived in her Park Avenue apartment until her death.
Ms. Halbreich worked consistently until May and never retired. A new book, “No One Has Seen It All: Lessons for Living Well From Nearly a Century of Good Taste,” is to be published in April, with a foreword by Lena Dunham.
Ms. Halbreich’s years as an unhappy shopaholic left her with a knowing attitude about the place of clothes in a woman’s life.
“The displacement of love, affection and attention onto a pair of shoes or a dress has built an entire industry,” she wrote. “Like all good defenses, however, they are best used in moderation and only when one understands a little of the motivations that lurk beneath the surface.”
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