Jewish refugee became D.C.-area high-end boutique operator
Claire Dratch, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany whose eponymous boutique in suburban Maryland has gowned Washington, D.C., society for seven decades, died Sept. 20 at her home in Chevy Chase, Md. She was 96.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said her son David Dratch, who now serves as president and chief executive of ClaireDratch Inc.
Late Washington gossip columnist Diana McLellan once called the high-end clothing store — which specializes in formal attire and accoutrements for weddings, galas, promsand other soirees — a local “institution” that catered to “Washington woman from Cabinet wives to soccer moms, from country clubbers to patent lawyers.”
“Three generations of Washington brides,” she added, “have been Dratched.”
Dratchandher husband, a clothing industry veteran, opened shop in Bethesda in 1948. Its location initially drew quizzical looks from peers in an era when ladies of leisure traditionally donned their white gloves and matching shoes and drove downtown to Garfinckel’s, the department store that defined the region’s elegant fashion taste. But her husband saw opportunity for an upscale store amid the proliferation of bucolic country clubs and well-tended homes in the postwar years.
Claire Dratch quickly developed a loyal clientele drawnto the versatility and craftsmanship of the clothes, which Dratch saw to it were made by designers whose styles could not be found everywhere else. The Dratches opened a bridal department around 1960, weary of customers asking for advice about where in New York they could find a wedding dress.
Wedding gowns became one of the shop’s most popular items, and for years the store displayed a gallery of brides, photos sent in by beaming newlyweds. Dratch recounted to McLellan one repeat bride’s request: “You have to take that picture off the wall. That was my first husband, and I’m here for my fitting formy fourth.”
“I was quite surprised,” Dratch said, “because she was fitting a very weddingy gown with a three-yard train. But she explained — ‘Well, formy first wedding, I was far too young. My second, I married on the rebound. My third was killed in a motorcycle accident. Now finally, I am going to be the bride I always longed to be.’ ”
The Dratch Hatch — a wing of the store that catered to teens — opened in 1965, but Dratch said it later shuttered because young women preferred to hang out at the mall instead of shopping with their mothers.
Over the decades, the store increasingly became one of the dwindling sororities of local specialty shops.
Claire Bacharach was born on Dec. 17,1919, in Seligen stadt, Germany, which she described as a small community where its few dozen Jewish families mixed easily with the dominant Catholic population. As a child, she often accompanied her best friend to midnight Mass at Christmas.
After the Nazi rise to power in the early 1930s, the social dynamic changed ominously. “Friends no longer walked with me, or sat in the train with me, or wanted to be seen with me,” she later recalled. “I was no longer welcome to participate in school functions. My name could not be mentioned in the class yearbook.”
She was devastated and, at 16, made her way to the United States to live with her elder sister in Chicago. Her father, a butcher, was beaten during the anti-Semitic attacks of1938known as Kristallnacht.
Her parents managed to escape the next year just before the borders were sealed on the eve of World War II. Oncevigorous, they were now broken — “two crippled, elderly people”— that she barely recognized. But they avoided the fate of many of the town’s remaining Jews, who were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.