Before there were Bergdorf Blondes, there was Betty Halbreich, the industry’s most famous personal shopper. The trim, white-haired, and always well accessorized Halbreich, who Vogue one described as “a clear-eyed fashion pro,”and who became something of a New York Institution, has died, age 96.
For over four decades Halbreich was the head of Bergdorf’s Solutions, a department she started in 1976 at the behest of Ira Neimark and Dawn Mello. By 1978, Vogue then reported, the idea of an “aimed-at-women shopping program,” was catching on. Certainly it reflected the times; as more women entered the workforce, not only did they have new situations to shop for, they had less time to do so.
Known for her “peppery candor,” as The New Yorker put it, the stylish and savvy Halbreich, née Stoll, was born in Chicago and moved to New York in 1947, after marrying a man in the garment industry. Halbreich worked on Seventh Avenue and for Geoffrey Beene’s diffusion line before the collapse of her marriage,which she related in Vogue, led 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 come in and run it.”
A year later she was tapped to work one-on-one with individual and professional clients after passing an “entrance exam,” successfully selling to Babe Paley, a society swan. Halbreich would go on to work with soap operas and TV series including Sex and the City (with Patricia Field) and Gossip Girl (with Eric Daman), and sat in front of the camera in the 2013 documentary on the iconic department store Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf Goodman.