Meet the style ‘therapist’ of New York City
‘Fashion therapist’ helps elite banish sartorial demons
NEW YORK — Every weekday morning, Betty Halbreich walks down Fifth Avenue gritting her teeth.
“I’m always behind some young woman, teetering and tottering and buckling on her high heels. Women lose all their grace when they can’t walk. These days they can’t control their legs and they can’t control their rear ends, so they’re in double trouble,” she says.
“And when I see those behinds wiggling, I think to myself: ‘Heck, these girls aren’t wearing pantyhose! They don’t even have underwear on!’”
As New York’s pre-eminent personal shopper, a “fashion therapist” who has been helping women wrestle their sartorial demons since 1978, Halbreich must find most sightings of the general public troubling.
From the lofty confines of her Fifth Avenue office, Solutions, at Bergdorf Goodman, the sharptongued 85-year-old has been redressing everyone from celebrities and socialites to suburban housewives for the past four decades.
She taught Candice Bergen how to walk in high heels and advised Stockard Channing to show off her legs. She’s styled the likes of Meryl Streep, Sarah Jessica Parker, Estee Lauder and Joan Rivers and has just had her forthcoming memoir, All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go, optioned by HBO.
Halbreich is now immortalized on the big screen as one of the stars of Matthew Miele’s new film, Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s — a behind-the-scenes look at the New York institution co-starring Karl Lagerfeld, Vera Wang, Marc Jacobs and Christian Louboutin.
“The women who come in here mostly have one thing in common,” Halbreich rasps, magisterial behind her mahogany desk, that witty, Lauren Bacall-like face rising up elegantly from the confines of a black turtleneck.
“They’re not feeling great about themselves. Very few people have their own style, and if they do, they’re bored with it.”
The expression “personal shopping,” she goes on, is used loosely.
“But think about it: it’s really very personal. You’re taking a person’s clothes off and putting them into a dressing room. It’s like baring your soul.”
Writers and philosophers have wrangled over the question for centuries, but Halbreich knows the answer:
“A woman’s biggest fear is a three-way mirror. You should see their faces when I put them in there.”
Luckily for them, Halbreich insists in one smooth exhalation, “God gave me one very big gift: I know sizing. Women don’t understand sizes, and designers today make it even harder for them. What used to be a 12/14 is now an 8/10. Everything is scaled down and geared toward 0s, 2s and 4s, and yet there are some very big women out there.”
Pulling open an enormous hanging cupboard in the corner of her office, she tells me about a woman she’s “helping” at the moment.
“She’s one of the biggest women I’ve ever dressed,” she says in the non-judgmental tones of a mathematician faced with a particularly onerous equation. “But look at what I pulled together for her.”
Halbreich takes me through her selections: a handful of cashmere sweaters from a British brand, Eskandar, and some roomy but tailored floral dresses. There’s not a plus-size tarpaulin among them.
“I’m not gonna lie to you, big women aren’t easy to dress,” she shrugs, “but there are bigger challenges.”
Over her 36-year career, Halbreich has faced them all. She’s dressed 90-year-old women (“I get them on walkers and wheelchairs — that’s not easy”) and 12-year-old girls (“The first thing I do is send the mother away because I can see that little girl looking at me and thinking, ‘I’m really ugly and you’re an old lady and you’re not going to dress me the way I want to be dressed.’”)
She’s worked with three generations of the same family.
“But here’s the thing,” she points out, “they’re always confused. They wouldn’t need me if they were sane.”
When it comes to clothing, Halbreich tends to think we’re all distinctly unhinged.
“Women are emotional about clothes. When something happens in their lives, they come to me. Of course I only find out what that is once they’re in the cubicle. I have a young lawyer coming to see me this week who thinks she knows everything.”
She smiles.
“I’m going to kill her. She’s coming to see me because she’s desperate — or something’s happened. I’ll get them when they’re going through a divorce or a change of life, which I like,” she adds after a moment’s thought, “because then I can really mother them.”
There may be more choice now than there was when Halbreich was growing up in Chicago — where she was rummaging through her mother’s closet before she could talk.
Whole departments are dedicated to larger women, children and an infinite variety of textiles and styling for modern designers to make use of, but that hasn’t necessarily made Halbreich’s job easier.
“I’m not a trender,” she says solemnly.
“I’m ahead of the trend. But nowadays women want brand names and logos. I don’t like logos. I don’t like showing a woman a dress and telling them it’s a Prada or an Oscar. ‘Whose is it?’ they’ll ask automatically, especially the oldest, biggest, I-can’t-even-tell-you-who-they-are customers.
“The whole ‘What’s my best friend wearing?’ thing is stronger than it has ever been. Women are so competitive at the moment, especially in their 30s and 40s. Those newlywed women with young kids? They’ll Prada themselves to death.”
So if a woman comes to her and says she wants a Prada dress?
“They wouldn’t dare,” she says with a dark look.
When I ask how Halbreich manages the Russian Czarinas unleashing the black Amexes downstairs in accessories, she looks over at Bergdorf’s PR rep — who sat wincing in the corner for the duration of our interview — and mouths a strongly worded reply I’m asked not to print. Suffice to say that there are certain clients Halbreich won’t deal with.
“Not that I’d turn anyone away,” she insists.
“I wouldn’t have to. We’re with each other 15 minutes and if we don’t like each other, that’s it.”
She may once have worked as a wardrobe consultant on Sex and the City, but Halbreich believes the series has bred an “anything goes mentality” that makes her see red.
“The idea that you can put a sequin skirt on with a quilted coat and go out thinking ‘I look good’ …” she looks out of her window despairingly. “These days there are no rules of appropriateness. Women look like they’re going to the beach when they’re going to work.
“You’ll see a size-16 woman in a cutaway T-shirt, her bosom flagging in the wind, and tight jeans and flipflops; and older female commentators on TV with long extensions done in Shirley Temple curls — now you don’t wear curls in your 50s …” And the men? “Well they’re all stubbled to death, sitting with their rolled up shirt-sleeves in restaurants. And what about those heavy brogues with no socks? It’s like the fire department have just arrived.”
Isn’t all that a byproduct of today’s “be yourself” ethos?
“There are different ways to be yourself, aren’t there?” she grimaces. “How about by using your brain and working your way down?”
If you can’t manage that, Halbreich’ll do it for you.
Every morning she arrives at Bergdorf’s at 8:30 and “hits every one of the four womenswear floors until 9:30 a.m.”
There’s no minimum spend for your time with Halbreich (“Half the time they should be paying me for putting up with me”) but she never lets the client peruse the aisles with her, and she’s not in the business of borrowing from designers or lending out dresses.
“I’m not a stylist — they’re glitzier than I am — and I keep it a very clean business. Do you want to wear clothes that someone has worn on set or out on an evening? I don’t. But you should see the prices of clothes these days.”
People ask her if “they’re allowed” to wear the same dress twice.
“Are you kidding? At these prices you turn it inside out and wear it backward if you have to.”
Shoes, she sighs, are the bane of her existence.
“They’re the biggest fashion folly of this decade. This whole ‘paint your soles red and go’ thing, it’s a travesty: an orthopedic doctor’s dream. And it will pass, trust me.”
Some things have improved over time, however.
“Spanx has been a huge revelation. Although they’ve almost put the hosiery people out of business: the young don’t wear pantyhose any more. I think they’re crazy.”
When I tell her that in Britain, the women walk around barelegged all year long, she dons the curious, nostalgic air that so many Americans take on when you mention that funny little island.
“I love the U.K.,” she murmurs. “I mean the Queen, she’s really grown into her own, hasn’t she? She used to look quite dowdy, but now she’s got the Philip Treacy hat and the handbag that we all know there’s nothing in — not even the keys to the palace. There’s something peaceful about the way she dresses. It’s quite lovely in a very mad world.”
The Duchess of Cambridge is also deserving of Halbreich’s rare praise.
“She wears so much McQueen, and McQueen always looks the same, but she really does pretty well. Of course she has an extraordinary figure — athletic and lean — which is very easy to dress.”
Still there are challenges we Britons face that prove insurmountable even for Halbreich.
“I did an interview for BBC radio earlier this year,” she frowns, “and they hooked up to a woman in Scotland who said: ‘How can I get rid of those heavy Wellington boots I wear?’ ‘Well’, I replied, ‘my only suggestion is that you move to Florida.’”