Telling a Tastemaker's Tale

A Q&A with Tim Allis, author of "Henri Bendel and the Worlds He Fashioned"

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From the Gilded Age to the era of Gossip Girl, the name Henri Bendel has evoked the modern glamor of the American elite and the women who defined it, all wrapped in the iconic brown-and-white striped box. Bendel’s blend of business acumen and creative genius propelled him from Lafayette, Louisiana to Fifth Avenue, where his eponymous department store pioneered practices that would become the gold standard in luxury retail. In Henri Bendel and the Worlds He Fashioned, published by UL Press in September, Tim Allis chronicles Bendel’s journey as he conquered both the creative and business sides of the fashion industry.

A gay man born to Jewish immigrant parents in 1868, Bendel spoke French, which opened the doors for French designers like Chanel and Molyneux to make their stateside debut. Bendel’s store introduced international aesthetics to New York, which delivered the latest designs from Paris to women’s closets. Everyone wanted to be a Bendel Girl. But until now, little was known about the man himself. 

Allis grew up on Bendel’s family’s property—the distinctive, oak-strewn subdivision of Bendel Gardens in Lafayette. Growing up, he frequently biked past the Camellia Lodge, Henri Bendel's former home, unaware that someday his own path would mirror that of the New York tastemaker (Allis spent twelve years as Senior Editor of InStyle magazine). 

In light of the book’s release, we connected with Allis to discuss Bendel’s influence, his public and private life, and how Allis turned Bendel’s story into an objet d'art. 

From his shop on Fifth Avenue, Bendel introduced American women to French designers, including Chanel and Molyneux. For our modern audience, contextualize what this meant for American women at the time. 

Whoever the hottest designers were at the time, that’s who he was introducing to American women. He was showcasing cutting-edge designers, essentially introducing his clients to the future of fashion. But there was another component to it: he was bringing them the coveted French designs. Previously, only the very wealthiest and most fashionable women were able to go to Paris themselves and select their couture dresses. Now, Henri was bringing couture dresses back to the states—not just the true one-off couture pieces, but also copies of certain dresses and looks, with the permission of the Parisian couturiers. He was also bringing prices down. He was starting a kind of democratization of fashion.

You and Bendel are both Lafayette natives who entered their respective industries as outsiders, yet carved out your identities as tastemakers. What do you think it is about outsiders that uniquely equips them to challenge norms and bring fresh perspectives to the industry? 

I think that an outsider questions things and sees what the insiders don’t see. They don’t always know the rules, so they don’t know when they’re breaking them. In Henri’s case, his outsider status fueled him and gave him an edge because he had ambition and a hunger. If you don’t grow up around finery, I think the allure of it is even stronger. Perhaps he felt he had more to prove. That could be a combination of everything—from being Jewish, to being a Southerner, which might have brought its own discrimination in New York back in those days, and certainly for his homosexuality, which he kept under wraps. But I think all of those things probably gave him a quiet, secret mojo. You have to work harder and want to master it more. I think Henri felt like a sponge.

Now I’m thinking about him going to Europe for the first time—I think he was just intoxicated by the beauty and the history. He had probably been a pretty good history student, but that experience must have taken him to a whole new level. He was rhapsodic about French culture, French history, and ancient cultures. He referenced ancient cultures in his fashion writing a lot. I think he was besotted by all of it and wanted to incorporate it—not just in the dresses he was buying and the hats he was making, but in his life. And he did. He filled his homes with rare medieval and Renaissance tapestries and incredible furniture from Europe. He built his houses in a kind of Mozart house style in Long Island and a Tudor mansion in Connecticut. He shipped statuary from Europe back to the U.S. He wanted to bring Europe into his backyard—and he did.

A little bit of my feeling of being an outsider comes from my dad being from another part of the country. Like Henri, I think many gay boys often feel like outsiders, so I can relate to him on that level. I feel as if I have one leg in New York and the other in Louisiana.

You have a whole chapter dedicated to Bendel’s status as an outlier. His syndicated fashion column was bold, authoritative, and prophetic in a time when women had fewer resources to guide their fashion choices. How did his voice contribute to expanding the Bendel brand? 

I think Henri’s public proclamations and being quoted in the press were all part of his strategy. I think he knew it was a marketing tool and that there was probably something performative about his voice. In some ways, his fashion commentary was deeply authentic, but he also imbued his comments with a lot of drama because he figured it would have more impact—and it did. He can sound a little grandiose in his commentary, but a lot of old theatre criticism from that era, opera reviews, and other fashion writers all sounded that way back then. Journalism was more baroque. At the same time, he brought a kind of folksiness to his columns and writing; he would throw in an ‘ain’t’ or use some other bit of vernacular. I think he was tapping into his Southern roots and leveraging them, using that charm to his advantage.

Henri wasn’t the first American to bring couture back to the U.S. Women of great means, who traveled once or twice a year, were bringing dresses back long before him. But Henri became the biggest importer, and he brought back designers like Molyneux, and the first was Chanel. He wasn’t the only game in town, but there’s no doubt in my mind that his French helped lubricate the gears. 

I like to think, as a fellow Louisianian, that his Southern charm and some of the special qualities unique to Louisiana helped out, too—such as a sense of humor, self-deprecation, a kind of warmth, but also great enthusiasm. Whether it’s Cajuns or anyone in South Louisiana, we’re quick to put a ‘!’ at the end of sentences. We’re not shy. I think that adds to the effect.

Henri was mild-mannered in appearance and, I think, mild-mannered in his demeanor. He was a very elegant and quiet man.

You grew up in Bendel Gardens, which must have given you a unique perspective. How did that personal connection influence your research and writing process for the book?

I knew Bendel Gardens was named for Henri Bendel long before I started thinking about writing a book. Initially, it was just a cool fact—a neat connection to the neighborhood we biked around. I grew up playing all over the neighborhood, so it was interesting to know this land was connected to a famous guy.  In terms of writing the book, part of the motivation was, ‘Hey, I’m sitting on this hometown hero who not too many people know about. And if they do know about him, they don’t know much.’ People in New York or the rest of the U.S. don’t really know his story, so it started to become a question of, ‘How has there never been a book about this guy?’ That was the incentive. But on a personal note, I love the connection. How cool is that? I write in my afterword about the magnolia tree we climbed, kind of on our property line—was that a tree Henri planted? Was it spawned from a seed he planted?”

The book features archival images and documents—gorgeous sketches of dresses, photos of Bendel’s shop and patrons, and photos of Bendel and his associates. How important was it for you to include visual references to Bendel’s life and career? 

It was super important. Any story that is on fashion requires images. A stunning dress can’t really be described with words. A lot of Henri’s columns back in the day, and those of other fashion journalists, had to do just that. Fashion is a magical art form, and you have to see it to really get it. So, it was important to me to show a mix of dresses, hats, and sketches. It’s so great that the Brooklyn Museum is in possession of over 7,000 sketches in the Bendel sketch collection. He or his emissaries would go to Paris, look at the collections, and bring back the sketches. These served different purposes. They were something they could show clients, but they were also used by his own designers and seamstresses on staff to replicate dresses or to design new ones in that style. It was like a fall fashion preview. They’d put sketches on ocean liners, open up the binder, and say, ‘Ta-da! Here is what Paris is showing!’ There was photography, but it wouldn’t have captured the essence. The sketches were the natural way that designers worked and shared their creations. Plus, I just think fashion sketches are fabulous.

Images were crucial to this project, and it was part of a balancing act I’m hoping I achieved, which was to tell a biographical story about someone who lived and died many decades ago, but also to tell the story of a brand that was only closed a few years ago. Bendel had a 123-year history, and I wanted to make it interesting to people who like biographies or are interested in a story from Louisiana about someone who made good—but also to be of interest to the fashion crowd and Bendel enthusiasts. There are legions of women with an allegiance to the store. For older women, they have a memory of Bendel’s in the 1950s or 1960s, when it was one thing. Then, there are women a little younger—but not young—who shopped in the 1960s and 1970s and remember how innovative it was, like Geraldine Stutz’s windows. And then there are much younger women who know it from the Gossip Girl years in the early 2000s. By then, it had become much blingier, very accessories-driven, glitzy, and very much about the Henri Bendel name. At some point, they were selling house-made, house-branded items, most of them with the brown and white stripes. Not to everyone’s taste, and the fashion heavy-hitters turned their noses up at Bendel’s in the last 10–15 years, but there was a group of young women who thought it was cool.

Henri did not leave behind the kind of deeply personal writing that would have allowed me to really get inside his head at all times—no letters, no journals, and he never wrote his own memoir. I had to rely on accounts of others who knew him and their interpretations, as well as the writings of relatives who had their own perspectives. And, of course, his public writing revealed a lot of his personality. It’s biographical, but not a traditional biography.”

Like Bendel, you are a gay man who left Lafayette and reached the top of his industry elsewhere. Do you feel that there’s a certain sense of pride or responsibility in telling his story?

Very much. I approached that aspect of the story with some trepidation—not out of any shyness or reticence on my part to dive into gay topics in that realm; I had a byline in Out magazine and have been out for a long time. But I wasn’t sure. I had to put the pieces together and feel certain that Henri was gay, but of course, all the evidence was there and quickly found. I discovered things from family members years ago who confirmed it and spoke with descendants of his sisters and brothers. It was a happy open secret. I knew I had to proceed, but I wanted to make sure I framed it right because Henri lived freely, but not openly. It was a whole other era. You could hide in plain sight. Who knows how he even felt about his sexual identity, or how he might have characterized it among his companions? He was able to live with them, have them work for the company, and travel with them freely. On some occasions, he even referred to them as his companions, though that wouldn’t have had the connotation it has now. He could do that because he was Henri Bendel. He was famous, wealthy, respected—a gentleman—so no one was going to call him names or blow the whistle on him.

I write in the afterword that I hope Henri forgives my intrusion upon his privacy. I thought, ‘Am I outing him? Is this something he would really hate?’ I’ve concluded that, in 2024, Henri deserves to be liberated. If he were alive now, he would have no shame about his gender identity or who he was living with. He would be out in the open because it’s a different world now. That gives me permission to write honestly about him.

It’s amazing when I read the various short oral histories or academic papers how either his sexuality was not mentioned or hinted at very coyly. Even things written in the last twenty to thirty years are a testament to how tightly shut the closet door was until recently. It was fascinating how that was a taboo realm. That was one thing I thought I could bring to the research and to the story about Henri, and I was not about to blink about it. Life is too short.

In the book, Bendel is an advocate for beauty throughout his life, including the natural beauty of his home state. Could you describe his relationship to the state? 

Henri didn’t flee Louisiana. I could play armchair psychologist and say that as a young gay man, he may have had an urge to leave small-town life for the bright lights of the big city, but this wasn’t an age where coming to New York meant you could be liberated. He kept all that secret his whole life. He was making a living in Morgan City and could probably have chugged along for the rest of his life, or perhaps moved back to New Orleans to become a top dressmaker or hat maker. But it was the chance meeting with Blanche Lehman and moving her up to New York that set the wheels in motion. After she died less than a year into their marriage, he stayed on and, with a lot of help from her family in millinery accessories, he used that to set up his wholesale millinery business. He saw that coming to New York meant the sky was the limit; he could go for it and was well positioned to succeed.

His devotion was bedrock. I think that speaks to the traditions of old Southern families, where large families are very devoted to one another. I think Jewish families have a great tradition of loyalty, and those family ties were with him throughout his life. He returned to Louisiana frequently, spoke enthusiastically about it, and missed it when he wasn’t there. He loved coming back to Camellia Lodge outside of Lafayette. He was building, or intending to build, a home for himself on the property that was going to be close to the river, which he did not get to see completed. Clearly, he planned to spend a lot of time there once he retired.

My conclusion is that there were bumpy issues with the business, and just before that, the effects of the Depression were still being felt. I think at 68, he was ready to consider passing the baton to others in the company. I’m sure he was looking forward to spending at least half the year in Louisiana. I think he romanticized Lafayette at times. But he was passionate, and he found it to be another outlet for beauty and creativity, primarily in landscaping and gardening. He found beauty in the camellias as much as in beautiful fabrics, and he was able to indulge all of that in the dead of winter down in Lafayette. I think it was just one more aesthetic outlook for him.

What do you want the book to accomplish for his legacy and your own? 

I would love for Henri Bendel’s wonderful reputation, which was, let’s say, misplaced for about fifty to sixty years, to be restored. He was a line in a Cole Porter song, a syndicated columnist, and a name that still resonates. He didn’t need me to be the great Henri Bendel, but somehow he got forgotten. I’m so happy to try to bring him back into the light, reintroducing him to the fashion history timeline and reminding people of how important he was.

I hope people respond to his story of gumption, hard work, creativity, imagination, and the ability to dream—how all of that can really take you far.

As for me, I’m just happy to reconnect with Lafayette, my southern roots, and my passion for the beauty of Louisiana’s nature. I too love a gorgeous camellia and an elegant live oak. But I also love the theatre, which Henri helped costume, and I have an amateur’s appreciation for the beauty of fabrics and fashion. I think the book has allowed me to explore my North/South, big city/small city dualities in a way that I might not have had the chance to do if I hadn’t tackled this topic. 

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