Clearance Sale

Another Fifth Avenue folding

Manhattan's Fifth Avenue is a rugged road for fashion retailers. Those that have failed in the past decade include Best & Co., Arnold Constable and Peck & Peck. Now one of the street's very biggest names will disappear: Bonwit Teller. For most of its 80-year history, Bonwit's specialized in dressing well-heeled women in genteel elegance. But the store moved from mere affluence to a position of real fashion influence in the 1960s, when its sharp-tongued president, Mildred Custin, decided that Bonwit's should take the lead in promoting the designs of such emerging ready-to-wear pacesetters as Calvin Klein and France's Andre Courreges and Pierre Cardin. Says a Bonwit's buyer, recalling the glory days: "We were trying to be a store that would tell the customer what is correct and beautiful."

After Custin left in 1970 to form her own consulting firm, the store floundered. Over the next eight years Bonwit's owner, Genesco, the Nashville shoe manufacturer, brought in five different managers who came and went. After earning a $5 million profit in 1970, the Bonwit chain ran up a series of losses--$4 million last year on revenues of more than $110 million. The revolving-door management made store executives fearful of innovation, and Bonwit's identity as a fashion authority gradually faded. Says a security analyst: "The times changed, and Bonwit's didn't."

Last week Genesco Chairman John Hanigan, 67, announced the sale of Bonwit's twelve-story Manhattan building and real estate leases to Developer Donald Trump for $10 million. Allied Stores, a large retail chain, is negotiating to buy Bonwit's twelve branches across the country, which it would operate under the Bonwit Teller name. But at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, where Bonwit's was rouged cheek by powdered jowl with Tiffany and Bergdorf Goodman, there will probably be some sort of highrise.

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