Bloomingdale's History
Earlier company descriptions, brand line-ups, store counts and photographs from the history of Bloomingdale's, kept for historical reference.
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The Company Description of Its Time
Bloomingdale's is America's only nationwide, full-line, upscale department store, and a division of Macy's, Inc. - the historical profile's summary claim, kept first here because the word 'only' is the filing's argument: in a letter that also holds Bergdorf Goodman's single-city flagship and Barneys' handful of stores, Bloomingdale's is the luxury name that scaled nationally. It was founded in 1872, and in 2008 operates 40 stores in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Illinois, Minnesota, Georgia, Florida, Nevada and California. The company's own site is listed in the References for anything current; the profile's value is the century and a half of retail theatre summarised below.
Retailing as Theater, and the Bag
Print ads couldn't say it all - the store had to be experienced. So Bloomingdale's became the stage for gala events and fashion shows, including 'Woman Of The Year, 1947'; with music, lighting and sophistication, it was retailing as theater. In 1961 the Bloomingdale's team came up with the first designer shopping bags; since then, many have become collector's items - the neatest proof that the store treated its own packaging as a design object decades before that was a commonplace of branding. By the 70's everyone was stopping by 59th Street and Lexington Avenue for a look, including Queen Elizabeth: people came to see and to be seen, and once there were dazzled by the cutting-edge fashion of designers like Ralph Lauren, Perry Ellis and Norma Kamali, who got their first truly big opportunities at Bloomingdale's.
The 2000s statement closes the timeline on the store(?:'|')s own terms: Bloomingdale's is committed to once again lead the way with exclusive merchandise, customized services and alternative shopping venues - carrying on the Bloomingdale brothers' dream of always finding ways to set its stores apart, which is both the legacy and the promise of Bloomingdale(?:'|')s. A dated news item from the period - a store to open in Dubai (UAE) in 2010, posted September 22, 2008 - is kept in this record as the period marker it is: evidence of the international ambitions an American upscale chain was announcing on the eve of the financial crisis.
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References & Further Reading
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