Promenade Fine Fabrics
Purveyors of rare and rarefied fabrics and notions
Promenade Fine Fabrics has catered to Margaret Thatcher, the late, prim prime minister of the United Kingdom, as well as New Orleans’ bawdy transgender bounce queen Big Freedia. Mrs. Thatcher visited decades ago in search of vintage and unique buttons. Big Freedia paid a visit more recently seeking bold, shiny fabrics and feathers with which to create costumes for herself and her twerking backup dancers for a music video.
Both found what they had come for, Thatcher declaring “That’s so lovely;” Big Freedia, conversely, shrieking “That’s hot!” repeatedly as she riffled through the shop’s notions.
That one small shop could delight such disparate characters—as well as countless brides, debutantes, movie stars, costume designers, and an international following of well-dressed fashionistas—is testament to the breadth and depth of inventory to be found in the St. Charles Avenue shop.
Representatives chosen and placed carefully worldwide remain ever on the hunt for these sorts of fine goods; and critics in top sewing and fashion magazines, such as Vogue, have consistently rated the shop at the top of its field. Since 1968, Promenade has supplied the region with a brilliant array of sumptuous couture fabrics, including Irish linens; Italian and English wools; French, Swiss, Asian, and Indian silks; French laces; and brocades from designers such as Chanel, Missoni, Emanuel Ungaro, Anna Sui, Carolina Herrera, Oscar de la Renta, Ralph Lauren, and Armani. There are thousands of buttons, both vintage and contemporary, crafted from horn, mother of pearl, glass, stone, and wood. Tens of thousands of spools of ribbon line the walls in the bright, narrow, high-ceilinged shop. Most of them were woven in Europe between 1920 and 1970, among them unusual brocades, double-faced satin, grosgrain, and velvet—many of them one-of-a kind.
This being the South, you have probably run your hand along the surface of a finely meshed screen door where an errant thread of metal, broken loose from the weave, scratched you. Promenade offers up the same nuisance, but you’d forgive more easily here as, in this case, it’s gold or silver bullion thread woven into the ribbons that is pricking you, some close to one hundred years old and burnished with age. The world’s last lengths of the precious ribbons are housed at Promenade, hauntingly beautiful and just the least bit dangerous.
Following his father, Max, Herbert Halpern opened Promenade in 1968. The late Max Halpern was responsible for bringing fine couture fabrics to the region when he opened The Fabric Mart on Dryades Street (now Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard) in 1935. “Dryades Street was the only integrated shopping area in America at the time,” Herbert Halpern said. “It was grand, fine. Everyone shopped there. Literally everyone.” He began working in his father’s shop at age 12, remembering the thrill of selling a lady three yards of silk linen for $7.98 a yard and how worldly and important it made him feel.
Upon losing his lease and unable to secure another space on Dryades Street, Max Halpern begrudgingly moved his business to St. Charles Avenue, renaming it Halpern’s Fabrics, a business he ultimately grew to encompass twenty-eight stores stretching from Houston to Atlanta. Upon graduation from college, Herbert Halpern became responsible for traveling from store to store, overseeing operations. “I hated it,” he said. “It had become a chain.”
The world’s last lengths of the precious ribbons are housed at Promenade, hauntingly beautiful and just the least bit dangerous.
Leaving the business to his father and older brother, Herbert split, knocked around for a year, and decided to open a kitchen wares shop in San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square. But the lure of home and the fine fabrics he loved was strong, so he scrapped the idea. “Instead I came home and opened Promenade,” he said.
“The most exciting thing in my new business was having Beverly Sills, the grand opera star, come in for all of her wardrobe fabrics. Over the years we have had Dionne Warwick, Dustin Hoffman, Allen Toussaint, Phyllis Diller ...”
Herbert speculates that the elimination of home economics classes in high school and women entering the work force drove fabric stores out of business. His family’s nearby flagship store closed in the early 1980s, but Promenade hung on. “I survived by going to international fabric markets and establishing credit. I took an upfront approach and told them the truth: I wanted to buy their line but could not pay on delivery.” His passion for and encyclopedic knowledge of fabrics and notions; his courtly, elegant presence; and his warm, personable approach to customer service complete the equation for his lasting success.
He caresses the fabrics in the shop with reverence, sharing tales of each one’s provenance, the vintage lengths rolled carefully around sheets of tissue paper. He collects the magnificent, labor-intensive vintage goods because he knows in a few years he may very well have the only specimens left in the world—pure silk burn-out velvet from 1950s Europe; heavy, hand-painted silks fifty and sixty years old and just as pristine as the day they were completed; nearly impossible-to-find genuine silk faille; and long staple Egyptian cotton in such a superior weave as to resemble silk in look and feel. “All the mines for real Egyptian cotton were destroyed during the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt (1967),” he said.
Picking up a bolt of iridescent fabric and twisting it in his hands he said, “Listen. It crunches. Only Italian silk makes a crunchy sound.
Look, over here. We have every color of the first run of J.B. Bernard Company’s de-lustered satin polyester from France. They made only one run of this fabric. So fine it is easily mistaken for real silk.”
Movie scouts and costumers discovered Promenade early in New Orleans’ Hollywood South days. All the fabrics for Beautiful Creatures and Elsa & Fred as well as most of the fabrics used in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, NCIS: New Orleans, and Roots came from Herbert’s collections of hand-picked specimens. At the same time, the popularity of TV shows like Project Runway, the introduction of a sewing camp at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and an influx of young creative types to the city launched the textile business into a renaissance. Customers flocked to Promenade, often traveling great distances to get there.
But it really did not matter. Herbert Halpern, the man who had learned the fine nuances of textiles from his own father, was close to retirement age. “I really think that you have to grow up in this business to know it, and neither of my sons is interested,” Halpern told New Orleans Magazine in 2007. “In five to eight years, when I’m too old to do this, I’ll close up shop and retire, but until then I’ll remain, almost, the last man standing in this industry in the South.”
Then, out of the blue, the unthinkable happened. “My youngest son, Cole, just after getting a $150,000 law degree from Loyola, came to me and said he wanted to join me in the business. He hated being stuck in a cubicle.”
Cole Halpern joined the family business in 2012. A few months later, the younger Halpern’s unexpected passion took root when the family of Hyman Hendler, the venerable Queens, New York, wholesale ribbon genius who would piece together bits of ribbon to make new ones while riding the subway, announced they were closing the shop doors. As a wholesaler, Hendler had supplied ribbon to every fine designer since 1900. Cole Halpern raced to the scene. He was not sure what he was even dealing with, but he started shuttling the fine and rare ribbons to a friend’s apartment in boxes and garbage bags, ultimately hauling eighteen thousand pounds of vintage ribbon back to New Orleans. He said a teary-eyed Hendler employee presented him the rare bullion-threaded ribbons in a large garbage bag, saying she wanted only him to have them.
Cole Halpern expanded Promenade’s website and made it an Internet presence on sites like Etsy, where Promenade now sells vintage ribbon internationally, often to Australia, which has become the millinery capital of the world.
His father beamed with pride, making a sweeping gesture through the store. “I am thrilled to be leaving a legacy for my children,” said Herbert. “Cole will carry on instead of my having a retirement sale. I’m thrilled beyond words.”
Promenade Fine Fabrics
1520 St. Charles Avenue
New Orleans, La.
(504) 522-1488