Saks Fifth Avenue

The retail specialty store, Saks Fifth Avenue, has stood as a symbol of American wealth and prestige for most of the twentieth century. The firm was founded in 1902 when Andrew Saks, a street peddler from Philadelphia, opened Saks & Company, a men's clothing shop in Washington, D.C.

Saks soon expanded his store operations to Richmond, Virginia; Indianapolis; and New York City. For his New York store, Saks began actively courting the high-end retail market by stocking quality merchandise and offering first-class service. After Horace Saks became firm president upon his father's death in 1912, Saks made a bid to become the premiere specialty store for New York society. Saks buyers scoured the globe for unique and fashionable merchandise in order to build the store's reputation. With the shift of New York retail uptown during the 1910s, it became apparent to Saks that for the firm to continue its fashionable reputation, it needed a more prestigious address than its present location on 34th Street near Herald Square. The firm entered negotiations to takeover the site of the New York Democratic Club between 49th and 50th Streets on Fifth Avenue, but lacked sufficient capital to meet Tammany Hall's asking price. Therefore, Horace Saks agreed to merge his retail store chain with Gimbel Brothers department store, which operated stores in Philadelphia; Madison, Wisconsin; and New York. The resultant merger in 1923 created one of the earliest regional department store chains in the United States. Saks' old Herald Square store site was leased to Gimbels and combined with their existing store nearby, making it the largest department store in the world at that time.

The uptown store, christened Saks Fifth Avenue, opened in 1924 with great fanfare. Street windows displayed such luxurious items as raccoon coats and foot muffs for automobile travel. An electric-lighting system signaled chauffeurs when to pick up patrons. In an attempt to capitalize on the growing notoriety of the uptown store, Saks president Adam Long Gimbel decided to rename all the firm's outlets Saks Fifth Avenue, a stroke of marketing genius that conveyed the prestige of the address to every store. Gimbel undertook a branch store building program in 1926 designed to place Saks Fifth Avenues in carefully chosen locations in resort towns and prestigious residential areas in Chicago, Miami Beach, and Beverly Hills. Gimbel establish several trademark services including a gift-buying service for business executives, and they were the first retail store to have their own in-house fashion designer producing collections in the guise of Sophie Gimbel. The store's national reputation grew to the extent that "very Saks Fifth Avenue" became a popular euphemism for posh style.

St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, 2002 Gale Group.