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Whenever New York’s wealthy and powerful women needed a new outfit over the past five decades, they all turned to one person: Betty Halbreich.
Halbreich, who has died aged 96, sourced some of the most memorable ensembles in American popular culture in her time as a personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman. She selected clothing for television shows — often on big budgets — including Sex and the City and Gossip Girl from the renowned department store and dressed stars including actors Meryl Streep and Liza Minelli.
Halbreich was a pioneer of the personal styling services that are now ubiquitous in high-end department stores. Vogue called her “the industry’s most famous personal shopper”, for her dedication to developing a client’s personal style rather than following trends.
Born Betty Samuels in Chicago in 1927, Halbreich first moved to New York as a 20-year-old newly married socialite. Her father was a retail executive and her mother owned a bookstore.
“I sort of grew up in retail never realising in all my life that I would be sitting in this chair for 45 years,” Halbreich said in an Instagram video filmed in her office at Bergdorf Goodman last year.
Halbreich and her husband Sonny Halbreich had two children, the art curator Kathy Halbreich and John Halbreich, who went into the fashion industry. But her marriage collapsed.
As the relationship deteriorated, shopping became Halbreich’s distraction. Her friends saw her love for the prestigious shops along Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and suggested that she try her hand as a sales associate at Geoffrey Beene — who opened his first store on Seventh Avenue — to fill her time.
She was in her forties, and it was her first job. She was “so stupid” at it, “didn’t know what [she] was doing,” “didn’t like the paperwork” and hated making sales, Halbreich recalled in an Instagram reel last year. She preferred to watch the seamstresses construct dresses in the back of the showroom, she said.
Soon after, in 1976, she was offered a job at Bergdorf Goodman. It was there that she would found her famed personal shopping service, Betty Halbreich’s Solutions, in a small office on Bergdorf’s third floor with a view of Central Park.
Halbreich began her work days walking through the racks at Bergdorf’s, mentally cataloguing new arrivals. She would then greet clients — a combination of Manhattan elite, politicians, celebrities and executives. Her roster included Joan Rivers, Kim Cattrall and Walter Cronkite — every year Halbreich helped him select a Christmas gift for his wife.
Halbreich insisted on joining each of them in the dressing room, where she was famous for her frank critiques and indifferent to how much clients actually spent. She did not earn commissions.
“I just stood there and told people how to dress,” Halbreich told Women’s Wear Daily in 2014.
This approach to shopping was featured in the 2013 documentary movie on the store, Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s.
“In a world which can often busy itself [with] superficial concerns, one had to appreciate your take-no-prisoners, no-nonsense approach to it all,” wrote Linda Fargo, Bergdorf Goodman’s senior vice-president of fashion in a tribute to Halbreich after her death last month.
“Every moment [with] you was a masterclass in level headedness, ethics, delivering on the promise and of course, style!”
Halbreich’s own personal style consisted of “sober tailoring” combined with “playful accessories,” according to a 2012 profile in the New Yorker magazine. Her closet is “the Vatican library of vintage”, Halbreich’s son John said.
Despite a cancer diagnosis, Halbreich never retired. She continued to work at Bergdorf’s until May this year and often shared reflections on her life and career on Instagram and TikTok.
She had already written two memoirs — Secrets of a Fashion Therapist (1997) and I’ll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist (2014) — and a third, No One Has Seen It All: Lessons for Living Well from Nearly a Century of Good Taste, which was scheduled to be published next year.
“Most people don’t view me as someone who is terribly inadequate,” Halbreich said in a video she posted on Instagram in June 2023.
“You have to understand I can’t add two and two. I’m very poor at it. I don’t want to. Anything I don’t want to do, I don’t do. And that’s how I’ve gotten through life.”
