Queen of Styles

Bendel's lady is a champ

The fashionably dressed owner of Manhattan's most chic West 57th St. emporium arrives late to most appointments, except the Wednesday-afternoon staff meetings in her elegantly spacious office. Gathered around her burnished Louis XV desk, some 20 directors and buyers bring forward the trendy products that they have scouted out from as far away as mountain villages in southern Italy or as near as a young designer's SoHo loft: cardigans in this fall's newest colors (baby pastels), crepe de Chine jumpsuits by Stephen Burrows, $85 knit caps from Paris. The show-and-tell sessions can last for three hours. Then, with her merchant's instinct, Geraldine (Gerry) Stutz, 56, grandly decides which products Henri Bendel will carry.

After 23 years as Bendel's president, Stutz bought the store in July. Today, she says, like a child who has just inherited a candy shop: "I'm doing just what I have always done here, only now I'm doing it for me."

By 1957 the millinery store that Henri Bendel started in 1890 had fallen out of step with fast-changing fashions. It was on the "wrong" side of Fifth Avenue and was losing a staggering $1.5 million a year on sales of $3 million. W. Maxey Jarman, then chairman of Ge-nesco, Inc., a Nashville-based apparel conglomerate, snapped up the indebted store and turned it over to an unlikely boss: Geraldine Stutz, a onetime model and shoe editor at Glamour, who had successfully run the advertising for Genesco's I. Miller shoe stores. After reluctantly deciding to accept the job, Stutz swept through Bendel like a fall hurricane tearing through the Caribbean. Says a former employee: "It was 24 hours a day, and she has a temper."

Declaring that the store looked "like a bowling alley," Stutz started an expensive renovation. The result, she boasts: "The beginning of boutiques." Rows of tiny shops, scarcely bigger than Victorian dressing cupboards, were set up on the main floor. The street of shops became Bendel's fame and still provides one-third of the earnings of the whole store. The basic design has not changed in 21 years. "I keep thinking that one day it will look old-fashioned and passe," says Stutz, "but it doesn't." Customers there receive close but not suffocating attention from modish salespeople as they buy pheasant feather necklaces for $270 or silvery snakeskin-covered appointment books for $150. Actress Cicely Tyson, a regular customer, reportedly buys all her furs from Bendel's second-floor salon; and two years ago, former Beatle John Lennon grabbed up $10,000 worth of Christmas goodies for friends at the store's E. A.T. delicacy shop.

On Bendel's upper four floors, Stutz in the early 1960s began selling the latest creations of young, and then unknown, designers such as Jean Muir, Sonia Rykiel and later, Mary McFadden. Then, in a move that shocked other retailers, she instructed them to design clothes that would fit only the slender. Bendel catered to women almost as thin as fashion models with dress sizes that ranged from 2 to 10. Instead of driving away business, the move gave the store a certain cachet. In 1979 Bendel earned $1.4 million on $15 million in sales.

Three years ago, Genesco's new chairman, John Hanigan, began shifting company strategy away from women's fashion and back to shoes and men's wear. Recalls Stutz's friend and Vogue Consulting Editor Diana Vreeland: "Gerry had her eye on buying the store for years." When she saw the conglomerate's new policy, Stutz asked Hanigan if he would give her first refusal on Bendel. After some scurrying to find an international group of Swiss-based financiers, Stutz was able to beat the best offer that Genesco had received.

Stutz is planning to take some of the Bendel magic to other cities. Within a year or so, the intimate and elegant first-floor street of shops will start being copied in new stores in Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas and other high-income cities with high-fashion aspirants. Says she, confidently: "Our merchandise is absolutely suited for those places. We have a stocking department that does $500,000 a year in business because we have hosiery in a dozen colors that nobody else has."

All the new Bendel stores will stock only the products that win Stutz's approval at those Wednesday-afternoon fashion forums. Once a curious customer asked why Bendel had suddenly started carrying house plants. Replied a saleswoman without a moment's hesitation: "Because Gerry is interested in plants." At Bendel, that is enough. -

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