Momma's Legacy

Loehmann's, one of the first bargain retailers and lately one of the fastest growing, does not have customers; it has addicts. Says one shopper, a woman who works for a New York advertising agency: "When I miss a week, I feel as though I've missed out on something. My stomach gets tight and I feel sick." Lauren Bacall, in her autobiography, By Myself, cites Loehmann's nine times or so.

Betty Ford was a devotee. Former Macy's Executive George Greenberg, 60, Loehmann's chairman and president, recalls a woman approaching him and saying: "Coming to Loehmann's is like therapy forme." Loehmann's has been affecting its clientele this way since 1920, when Freida Loehmann opened a clothing shop under her Brooklyn apartment, started paying cash to top makers for garment overruns and selling them at deep discounts, also for cash.

By the time she died at 88 in 1962, "Momma" Loehmann was a force in the retailing of women's clothing.

Today, with warehouse headquarters store and central warehouse located in The Bronx, Loehmann's is spread over 25 states in 65 stores, nearly 40 of which opened during the past ten years. The chain had sales this year of about $270 million.

Loehmann's rigorously no-frills outlets carry no shoes or lingerie. Credit cards are not accepted, nor are returns. Salespeople provide little service. Dressing areas are communal, mirrored rooms with harsh lighting, places of pandemonium on weekends. Women enter, check modesty at the door, and frantically try on designer fashions with no labels but with thinly disguised codes on price tags: RL is Ralph Lauren, GEB Geoffrey Beene, BLA Bill Blass.

Prices usually run 33% to 50% under those at traditional retailers for accessories, skirts and dresses, right on up to discounted sable coats for $25,000. Loehmann's was sold in 1980 to a group of private investors for $68 million, in cash, of course, and then in May of this year to Associated Dry Goods for $96 million, again in cash. Associated's new ownership of Loehmann's amounts to a princess's consorting with a shopgirl; its other properties include New York's Lord & Taylor, one of the most dressed-up stores in America. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.