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October 23, 1959. "Bloomingdale's, Hackensack, New Jersey. Green Room, Sutton Place. Raymond Loewy, client." Where all those Stepford Wives got their start. Large-format acetate negative by Gottscho-Schleisner. View full size.
A woman would have to be pretty severely trussed up to attain the look of any of those mannequins. The dress on the right with the criss cross midriff looks particularly challenging, even for a woman with a good figure.
Is this THE Raymond Loewy, the great industrial/automotive designer? I wonder what the connection is, especially if he's the client.
[His firm designed this space. - Dave]
I am amazed by the perfect lighting in all of these Gottscho commercial interiors. I can't detect any sources of additional lighting, yet surely these spaces weren't this perfectly lit on their own.
[While they would have been cropped out in printing, some of the supplementary lamps occasionally do show in the negatives, for example here. - tterrace]
This looks like the kind of salon where a Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn would visit, with a William Holden at their side, for some last minute frocks before the long trek to Florida for the winter.
I remember going into stores like this with my mom when I was a kid; of course, Bloomingdale's was only once in a while. My mom preferred less expensive stores: Gertz, Alexanders, and Newberrys etc.
The floor space then was amazing, especially to a little kid. Go into any major department store today, and you can barely move around. Racks everywhere; no shopping baskets, of course: there isn't any room.
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