In a city that knows fashion, Galeries Lafayette is laying France’s reputation for unparalleled style on the bottom line. Located mere blocks from such style-setters as Bergdorf Goodman and Henri Bendel, it is counting on French culture, French sophistication and French snobbery to lure customers. “This will be the store of Parisian chic,” says Meyer, Galeries Lafayette’s chairman and chief executive. “We all know that French women have this wonderful, innate way of putting themselves together to make a personal look.” Now, with any luck, their less fortunate American sisters will learn how to do the same.
The store has limited space for its ambitious goals. Unlike the sprawling 500,000 square feet in Paris, the New York store has only 40,000. To ensure the highest possible turnover, Galeries Lafayette will focus only on women’s clothing, lingerie, accessories and cosmetics, which have higher sales potential than menswear or home furnishings. The featured designers will all be European, though some private-label designs will come from Americans. Because of longstanding exclusive agreements with other New York stores, many of the more famous French designers like Christian Lacroix cannot sell their lines to the American Galeries Lafayette.
If all goes as planned, the store’s customers will be immersed in France the moment they walk in the door. They will be greeted in French by a bilingual concierge, and the company has trained its mostly American sales staff in matters of French customs and trends. Employees have been taught, for example, the way French women often replace a jacket with a shawl layered over a sweater or how to use accessories to liven up an old outfit.
No one knows whether that will be enough to succeed in a city where such venerated stores as Bonwit Teller and B. Altman have closed their doors, and Bloomingdale’s parent company, Federated Department Stores, Inc., has filed for bankruptcy. But Meyer isn’t worried about failure. He believes New York-and retailing–will bounce back. “Paris, New York, London,” he says. “These are the cities that represent Western civilization.”
