For what? The purse shopper at Nordstrom or the dress shopper at department stores? And either way; they kept models on staff just for this rare need?
The dress shoppers in the old days. And the models weren’t on staff, they were freelance professional models. Not haute couture runway models, but local models who also modeled in ads, worked at trade shows, and all the other things gig workers do.
I have no idea how Nordstrom handles things, but back in the day my old store probably would have pulled an assistant buyer or department clerk away from their desks to bring in the purses.
That was how everybody bought a designer dress or other important garment, back in the day. Besides the staged fashion shows with models that Kent_Clark mentioned, part of the duties of a sales assistant in an elite dress shop was literally to “show” a garment to individual clients.
The manufacturer didn’t make an item in a universal range of sizes that the client could try on for herself. Ladies certainly didn’t go clothes shopping with the expectation of stripping down in the shop to insert themselves into some readymade imperfectly fitting garment that any number of random strangers might have tried on beforehand.
Rather, the gown was fitted to the assistant/model who would show it, so the client could see what it would look like when worn. If the client decided to buy it, another copy of the gown would be fitted to her individually.
Many high-end ladies’ clothing departments in fancy department stores worked the same way. You didn’t invest in mass-marketing ad campaigns with pictures of pretty models wearing your clothes to attract potential customers. Instead, you used shop assistants/models to “market” directly to individual clients, or sometimes groups of clients, who were already in your store and who had the interest and the resources to spend serious money on your clothes.
Again, I wasn’t talking about the fashion shows open to the public but private ones for a single shopper looking for an expensive dress or purse. I can’t imagine they called in models just for that.
Urban downtown malls have struggled in no small part because they tried to offer a suburban product in a downtown setting. Free easy parking in anathema to a downtown, and it required big subsidies for garages. A garage alone is enough to scare many wary suburbanites, and they still add friction to the process even if they’re easy to access and free of charge. Successful downtown malls overseas are usually paired with major public transit stations, additional nightlife, restaurants, and other walkable destinations. When many downtown malls were built in the US, it was in the nadir of downtown as a whole, which had been relegated to 9-5 workaday stiffs who might pop into the food court for lunch once a week at best and didn’t want to linger around before the maddening drive home, let alone come back in the evening. It’s a similar reason why pedestrianized areas in the US have struggled, many of which were built in conjunction with those downtown malls. There just wasn’t enough pedestrian foot traffic, and our streets are often too wide to properly activate with so few people, so they feel empty and dangerous.
Anyway, lots of suburban malls have been dying too, it’s just the affluent malls that are doing OK, and even that’s not a guarantee.
Cincinnati is a metro of 2 million, and it had eight traditional enclosed malls and two downtown style urban malls, not counting outlet malls and some of the other oddball lifestyle centers and pseudo strip centers out there. Only the one affluent mall, Kenwood, is doing well. Florence defaulted on loan debt after the pandemic, and may be at an inflection point. Its main advantage is that it’s clear on the other side of the metro from Kenwood. Everything else is either dead or dying.
Kenwood (affluent, doing great)
Florence (doing ok)
Eastgate (dying)
Northgate (dying)
Forest Fair (dead)
Tri County (dead)
Beechmont (dead)
Western Woods (dead)
Tower Place (downtown, dead)
Newport on the Levee (downtown-ish, dead/redeveloping)
In comparison, Northbrook Court, which is on ground-zero of Chicago’s affluent North Shore suburbs, has almost completely imploded. That was the high-end mall with the likes of Marshall Field’s (RIP), Lord & Taylor, and Nieman Marcus. Only Nieman Marcus is left, and the whole property is going to be redeveloped. I guess Old Orchard won that battle, but even it is getting a major redevelopment.
I agree with you regarding the reason. There are three malls near me within a mile-long stretch of a single street. And they are doing well although they are urban - but they specifically are not trying to offer a suburban product. Parking isn’t free and there isn’t that much of it. Most of the people I know who drive prefer to go to suburban malls. But the reason these malls are doing well is because they are near bus and train lines and there are enough non-drivers * that one mall gets around 20 million visitors per year.
* Only about 60% of households in the county own cars and junior licenses aren’t valid here so virtually no one under 18 drives.
Assuming that the shopper made an appointment, and had enough money to buy one or more expensive dresses, why not? An hour of a model’s time was relatively cheap, and rich shoppers bought high profit fashion clothing, especially at a time when proper ladies didn’t wear off the rack stuff and there were more opportunities to show off fancy dresses.
When I was a kid suits were not bought ready to wear, but you tried on the type of suit you wanted, a tailor employed by the store did measurements, and a week or so later you got the suit altered to fit you.
I’d be surprised if the Macy’s in my mall even has a tailor any more.
I agree with others that this probably still happens to some limited extend in NYC.
I definitely have seen my wife get this kind of treatment in shopping centers in Rio de Janeiro–it was really neat to watch multiple kind attendants coming to show her all of their wares, putting together outfits for her and selecting different items while she was in the changing room.
While they were caring for my wife’s needs, one of them would offer me coffee. I would relax at a little table and she would bring over a serving tray with a silver serving set and let me enjoy coffee while my wife shopped.
According to my wife, back in the day the people working in traditional clothing stores in Rio couldn’t afford to buy the products they sold. That labor vs. product disparity would explain how they could provide such great service. I haven’t been there in a decade or so, so this probably isn’t as common now.
I don’t think this is accurate. I’ve seen malls close in New England, and I’ve seen malls open that have local mom and pop stores barely surviving in them as well as empty store fronts.
The mall concept doesn’t appear to be healthy to me.
The person you’re quoting said this 19 years ago. I don’t know that malls were as healthy as they said then, but they certainly weren’t as bad off as they are now.
2005 was before the 08 crash, before Amazon took off, before DoorDash or UberEats. It was a different world.
There is a Wall Street Journal article from 2022, whose stats were repackaged by numerous other news outlets, which states that only 700 malls remain in the US, and they expect that number to dwindle to 150-200 by 2030. In the 1980s there were roughly 2,500 malls, so we’ve already lost roughly 3/4 of them. That pretty well correlates with my Cincinnati stats above. I suspect it’ll be a long-tail kind of situation though, with numbers not falling much more than that. Still, the new normal is going to be a very different beast.
Weirdly a new mall opened in 2019 in Connecticut (The SoNo Collection in Norwalk), anchored by Nordstrom and Bloomingdales, the first one in the state. Both are higher-end stores, so perhaps there is still a market for those with money.
FWIW, in Canada the last surviving traditional department store chain, the Hudson’s Bay Company, is thriving precisely because it differentiates itself as a high-end purveyor of luxury goods. By “traditional” I mean large multi-floor stores with service counters manned by actual staff. HBC survives by offering a pleasant upscale shopping experience and high-end products. Walmart and the like, which aren’t really department stores in the proper meaning of the term, cater to the low end. It’s the old department stores that catered to the commodity mid-range market that couldn’t survive, and they were in trouble long before Amazon and the internet transformed the retail business.
Interesting article, which confirms what I’m seeing locally: Most malls are dying, except for malls that cater to the Asian community. Those are thriving.
Well, some department stores have become hybrids. They have the physical store, but they also have online shopping that you can have delivered directly to your home or delivered to a physical store. Clothes purchases delivered to the store can be tried on there and sent back if necessary before you even leave.
I like shopping at HBC and they have some good quality stuff, especially online. But although well managed and staying afloat, and sometimes with good profits, it is not all smooth sailing. They are almost a real estate company…
Hold up, what? The Hudson Bay Company runs malls?
Next you’ll tell me the East India Company runs an airline or that Genghis Khan’s horde operates car dealerships.
It does, but is more popularly known for being “Canada’s (still extant) department store” and (increasingly less) frequent mall anchor. It is our equivalent of Macy’s in terms of quality and selection. Montreal has Simon’s and Toronto Holt Renfrew - the hoity toity places. (I don’t know what Vancouver has.)
HBC owns Saks (which is more upscale) and has owned Lord & Taylor and some European chains. Obviously the current business environment was hugely challenging even prior to Covid.
I can get you a good deal on a 2022 Kublai.
When I was a kid, my grandmother’s next door neighbor was one of these models for the Bullocks department store. Once, we went to tea at the Westwood store, and I saw her modelling while we were eating. That was definitely in the waning days of the practice.
Yes, many of us remember studying about the Hudson Bay Company and the fur trade decades ago when we were in school, but have no knowledge of modern retailing in Canada (other than something about several American chains having Canadian branches).