Though she would come to intimately influence and embody the fashionable aesthetic of New York’s fashion elite, Geraldine Stutz was not a native New Yorker. She in fact credited her early education by the nuns of Saint Scholastica’s in Chicago, where she was born in 1924, as being incredibly formative on her professional life, shaping her strong sense of discipline.[1] Academically successful, she pursued studies at Mundelein College, a women’s college in Chicago. While Stutz began her degree with a focus on theatre and drama, she completed her studies with majors in English and Journalism, graduating with honors. However, her love of the theatre would influence her approach to merchandising and inspire her personal support of theatre in New York throughout her life.
Stutz relocated to New York City in 1945 at the age of 21 and began working for magazines, becoming a shoe editor at Glamour. Her knowledge of footwear eventually led her to I. Miller Shoe company, where she quickly rose to become vice-president, despite lacking any formal training in retailing. When I. Miller’s parent company Genesco purchased specialty store Henri Bendel in 1957 its president Maxey Jarman soon installed the young Ms. Stutz as president, making the 33 year-old only the third female to ever preside over a major New York fashion establishment following Hortense Odlum of Bonwit Teller from 1934-1940 and Lord & Taylor’s Dorothy Shaver from 1945-1959.
Stutz approached the reform of Bendel’s from the perspective of a shopper, and was adamant that despite her lack of formal training in merchandising, she took advantage of creating a store in which she herself would desire to be a customer.[2] This risky approach was enhanced by her giving great leeway to her buyers to be professional customers, and pursue what she called “dog whistle fashion”, or “clothes with a pitch so high only the thinnest and most sophisticated women would hear their call.”[3] Stutz viewed the store as her stage, a theatrical production projecting a marvelous, charmed lifestyle. The success of her vision and its application, albeit for a particular elite consumer niche, was evident from her long tenure at Bendel’s and the store’s surging fiscal success from the early 1960s onward.
As a result, her departure from Bendel’s in 1986 came as a surprise to the fashion community, and Stutz herself likened the end of her career at the store to that of losing a child.[4] While her later professional life included forays into publishing, consulting and working as a retail turnaround specialist, arguably these projects lacked the impact of her time at the helm of Bendel’s. The fact that her diverse career bridged both media and merchandising, demonstrates not only her own capabilities as a businesswoman, but also the interconnected nature of those fashion fields. Throughout her life, she remained one of New York’s most recognizable fashion figures.
These images have been reproduced with the permission of the Geraldine Stutz Trust Inc.
[1] Sheila Cunningham, “She Bought The Place,” in Working Woman, January 1981.
[2]The New York Times, “Hairdressing Salon Opens Today in Bendel’s,” May 10, 1965.
[3] Jesse Kornbluth, “The Battle of Bendel’s: How the Midwest took over New York’s Citadel of Chic,”New York Magazine, February 23, 1987.
[4] Robert Rufino, interview by LaurenSagadore and Hazel Clark, June 12, 2014, transcript.