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Jim Bradshaw
The eulogies for Italian icon Valentino Garavani, who died last week, are a reminder that he was not high society's first fashion dictator, nor the first to make a huge fortune from it. Lafayette native Henri Bendel sold hats, dresses, handbags, and high-class accoutrements to the elite of New York and Paris for decades, and the landmark store that he built on New York’s Fifth Avenue remained in business for nearly 125 years.
Accountants concluded in 2018 that the fashion empire he created couldn’t cut the mustard any more. But for a long time Bendel was the mustard.
He was born in Lafayette in 1868. His parents were William Louis Bendel and Mary Plonsky. William died when Henri was six years old but his mother continued to run a furniture store, a drug store, and a funeral home. She remarried in 1878 to Benjamin Falk, who ran a dry goods store and brought everything from opera to vaudeville to the Falk’s Opera House, which was above the store.
Even though both the Bendel and Plonsky families were Jewish, Henri studied at St. Charles College at Grand Coteau and converted to Catholicism while he was a student there. He clerked for two years in the Hiller Plantation Store in Lafourche Parish and then for another two years in New Orleans before opening his first millinery store in Morgan City in 1894.
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I’m sure he didn’t think so when the store burned to the ground shortly after it opened. but that might have been a piece of good luck. That’s when he decided to move to New York.
The decision might have been prompted by a young lady named Blanche Lehman whom he’d met while she was visiting Louisiana. They were married in New York in September 1894.
His first millinery shop at 67 East Ninth Street failed when a partner ran off with the money, but Henri opened another store that became hugely successful, unfortunately for tragic reasons. Blanche died in childbirth in July 1895 and the child did not survive.
According to a biography by University of Louisiana professor Alvin Bethard, “Deeply bereaved by the loss of his wife and child, Bendel channeled all of his time and energy into his business. Soon hats with the Bendel label were in great demand. Wealthy socialites began to patronize his shop [and he] developed a keen sense of what the New York woman wanted.
A recent biography by Tim Allis notes that Bendel dressed the Astors and the Vanderbilts as well as stars of stage and screen but also offered more-or-less affordable merchandise for the less affluent. According to that biography, he set the standard for taste not only through his elegant clothing but also through a nationally syndicated newspaper column. (Henri Bendel and the World He Fashioned, UL-Lafayette Press, 2024) It was considered a daring move when Henri built an impressive store on upper Fifth Avenue, which was then a residential area. It paved the way for Fifth Avenue’s “ascendancy as the fashion center of the country,” according to Allis. The move to fancier real estate brought even more patronage from New York socialites who made him as wealthy as themselves.
He kept an apartment on Park Avenue in New York and a 40-room mansion in Stamford, Connecticut. He later built a chateau at Great Neck, Long Island, that had 10 bathrooms, an eight-car garage, a greenhouse, and what was described as one of the fanciest chicken houses ever built.
The French-speaking entrepreneur also kept an office and laboratory in Paris, where he created soaps and perfumes. He was the first retailer to bring the designs of Coco Chanel to the United States from Paris.
Henri bought the former Walnut Plantation on the Vermilion River in Lafayette in 1927 and had it landscaped with camellias and azaleas. That’s how it came to be known as Bendel Gardens. He also built a house on the property but never lived there.
The New York store continued to cater to the fashionable after Henri died in 1936 and was described by the New York Times in 1957 as “a high-end emporium for designer clothes.”
When it was announced that the store would close at the beginning of 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported, that “since news broke . . . fans and tourists have streamed into its Fifth Avenue flagship … taking nostalgic last looks.”
“You don’t understand what this store used to be,” a 56-year-old shopper told the Journal. She recalled that as a 20-year-old she saved all summer for a $250 Henri Bendel handbag. When a gun-wielding mugger accosted her a week after the purchase, she told him, “You can take the money, but please let me keep the purse.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@ gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
