An aura of legend exists around America’s mid-century department stores. The May Company in Los Angeles, for instance, had models walk around its restaurant wearing select garments and holding up a number so that diners could order an outfit directly to their tables. 

Today the old May Company building is a museum about films. Most of the US department stores that defined the era are either teetering on oblivion or have been hoovered up by big retail groups or private-equity firms. Macy’s has already closed its branch in Philadelphia’s Wanamaker Building, part of a wider plan to shutter 150 of its shops over the next three years. And then there’s Neiman Marcus: it had been due to close its doors on 31 March but a last-minute intervention by the city of Dallas has kept it open until the end of the year. However, its ultimate fate and future remain uncertain. 

I look back fondly at the heyday of department stores, with their cocktail hours and clued-up clerks who knew their best customers’ measurements by heart. But it’s not just this retail experience that I’m nostalgic about; I’m also nostalgic about the way that these retailers were run. In their prime, their owners took luxuries that most of today’s finance-focused CEOs simply wouldn’t indulge: whimsies and joyful extravagances that made department stores celebrations of fashion and life rather than just selling products. In recent years the in-store experience hasn’t been able to keep up with the pace and ease of online shopping. A physical retailer simply cannot cut through as it once did if it’s just another multi-brand boutique that prioritises returns over the experience of its clientele.

When Neiman Marcus opened its first Dallas outpost in 1914, it was a gamble to bring high fashion to a market far from New York’s Fifth Avenue. But the shop tapped into the ascendent purchasing power of banking families and the oil-rich. Neiman’s was more like a film studio than a shop, with hammered-together runways for impromptu fashion shows and salons where the latest designs from Paris were debuted over drinks. Writing about Neiman’s in 1945, *Life* described attentive staff doling out fashion advice to clients. “They have been known to stop a $1,000 [€929] sale because they thought that the article was unsuited to the customer who wanted to buy it.” 

There were no algorithms at work here. Success required deep experience of the market, locally and globally. This meant investing in staff whose job it was to know who was living and spending in the city, as well as attending fashion shows with those customers in mind. All of this still happens, of course – but it’s fast disappearing. Some years ago I wrote about Hall’s, a family-owned department store in Kansas City that has held on against the odds. The leadership put this down to the personal connection that the buyers have with their clientele. Freshly returned from ateliers in Europe, buyers call up their best customers to invite them to the shop, first for drinks or dinner and, then, to reveal their latest finds.

Every time that a US department store closes, I lament the disappearing golden age of American retail. But I see reasons to be optimistic: Paris institution Printemps opened its first North American venture in New York in March. The interiors are extravagant – a bit wild, even – and there are promises of a reinvigorated retail model. Let’s see how it fairs.

^{All images: Nina Leen/The LIFE Picture Collection}