With department stores locked in fierce rivalries over customers, the industry soon employed corporate espionage as a basic tenet of how it conducted business. Dorothy Shaver, for instance, was put in charge of comparison shopping at Lord & Taylor, one of the country’s oldest and largest department stores. Comparison shoppers were store employees who posed as regular customers and “shopped” at rival stores, spying to discover what style of gloves was selling best, or what competitors were charging for Parisian evening gowns, or which items were headed for the clearance piles. Stores went to great length to conceal the identities of these comparison shoppers—not only from other stores, but from their own employees as well. This was because comparison shoppers were just as frequently tasked with surveilling their colleagues, wandering through various departments, and inconspicuously grading fellow staffers on friendliness and knowledge, then writing their findings in reports that provided the basis from which managers doled out bonuses or docked pay.
“I know one store that has a concealed entrance for its shoppers,” a contemporaneous source recounted. “Ladies simply go up to the business office and are taken in to see the adjustment manager, presumably to register a complaint. He lets them out another door that leads through a hidden passage to a little room equipped with typewriters. They nip in there and get their assignments in the morning and leave their sheets there in the evening.”
After a successful retail business selling dolls, Dorothy Shaver was tasked with "Comparison Shopping" AKA retail espionage at Lord & Taylor. Six years later, she was promoted to the store’s board of directors.
For her first day at Lord & Taylor, Dorothy chose a no-nonsense outfit that lent her an air of authority and discretion. The dark, conservative suit skirt, small gold earrings, and closed-toe pumps was to become a uniform from which she rarely varied over the ensuing decades, her one feminine flourish a sheer white linen handkerchief that she kept tucked into her sleeve. Within weeks of coming onboard, Dorothy realized that she despised comparison shopping. “The idea of ‘comparison’ struck me as ridiculous,” she said. “We should spend less time finding out what other shops were doing and pay more attention to developing our own business.” She began urging her boss to rethink the strategy, writing an unsolicited report recommending that the department be disbanded.
Instead of comparison shopping, Dorothy argued that Lord & Taylor should determine its own, individual path by creating a bureau of fashion stylists. Her idea was to employ women who understood fashion and could move between departments, advising customers how to match these gloves with this hat and that suit, and helping buyers identify coming trends. It was the first iteration of what would be known as personal shopping, a core service at Lord & Taylor for decades to come and a concept that was widely copied by competitors. While her supervisors like the idea of a bureau of stylists, they didn’t agree to do away with comparison shopping. Instead, they just added this to her growing list of responsibilities. It was the beginning of a tenure that saw repeated promotions and title changes. In Dorothy’s second year at Lord & Taylor, she became its director of fashions and interior decorations, and in her third year she was appointed to the store’s board of directors—one of only two women to hold the position.
In her fourth year, in 1928, Dorothy made her biggest splash yet. She spent six months traveling back and forth to Europe, visiting art galleries, touring showrooms, and scouring flea markets, carefully curating items for an exhibit that would establish her as the industry’s most promising young executive. That winter, flappers dressed in sequins and fringe and men in top hats and tails shivered as they walked a red carpet that had been laid out before the Fifth Avenue entrance to Lord & Taylor. There was Paul Claudel, the French ambassador to the United States; Frank Crowninshield the editor of Vanity Fair; and Otto Kahn, the financier. Long-stemmed roses stood in vases and a spotlight roamed the crowd as doormen politely ushered the city’s glitterati up to the seventh floor, where Dorothy had positioned herself, dressed elegantly in a white column gown, welcoming guests.
In 1945, Dorothy Shaver was promoted to president of Lord & Taylor. She earned a salary of $110,000 and was the highest paid woman in America. According to Life magazine, it was still only a quarter of what men in similar positions earned.
Dorothy’s Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art was the largest collection of Art Deco furnishings ever shown in America. Over the next month, more than 300,000 visitors flocked to see watercolors by Picasso, lacquer pottery by Jean Dunand, and sculptures by Chana Orloff. The store’s seventh floor was transformed into an art gallery, with salons displaying a boudoir by Vera Choukhaeff made of Baccarat glass, a suspended hammock by Pierre Chareau made of palisander wood and hung from the ceiling by handwrought-iron fixtures, and a polished walnut bed by Francis Jourdain featuring ebony inlay and an attached nightstand that could also serve as a breakfast table.
The demand for tickets was so great that the show was extended, twice. “Ambitious in scope, imposing in execution and authoritative to the last detail,” raved Women’s Wear Daily. “A magnificent exposition of French originals exceeding in number, variety, and beauty anything which heretofore has been seen of this new work in the United States,” exclaimed The Christian Science Monitor. After visiting the show, the Swiss modernist architect William E. Lescaze penned a fan letter to Dorothy, thanking her “for having had the courage and the strength to conceive it and to carry it out,” while Edna Woolman Chase, the editor of Vogue, wrote, “Surely this will bring you great acclaim.”
Dorothy called the expo “an expression of the age in which we live,” maintaining that even though the items had come from France, the Art Deco aesthetic, with its “simplicity, frankness and directness,” was quintessentially American. Her goal in presenting these works was to inspire American creativity, “to help guide a new movement in this country,” she told The New York Times. She hoped to convince domestic artists that they could “be leaders rather than onlookers.” It was such a success that the politician Grover Whalen, who had not yet seen the exhibition, sent Dorothy a note asking for a favor. “Look, I have to be up on dinner conversation,” he told her. “Everyone is talking about the show. Please tell me enough about it to carry on table talk.” Presumably she did.
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While the show burnished Dorothy’s personal reputation, it also brought profits and recognition to Lord & Taylor. To piggyback off the expo, the store had manufactured a line of its own Art Deco furnishings, and as visitors swarmed the exhibit, the Art Deco pieces sold briskly; within months, 20 percent of all the furniture that . And Dorothy’s effect was not limited only to the store. In the show’s wake, several large galleries began importing and selling Art Deco pieces, from furniture to artwork, and magazines published features on the new aesthetic, widely praising it and reporting how it had become the in-demand décor among America’s most fashionable crowds.
Dorothy’s efforts blurred the lines between art and commerce, managing to be both visually pleasing and profitable. She had proved that department stores could rival galleries, and even museums, as cultural arbiters. When she arrived in New York, Dorothy was a sheltered small-town transplant with no experience in business. Just a handful of years later, she emerged a visionary, the rare executive who could go beyond simply serving her customers’ needs and wants; she could actually shape their tastes.
From WHEN WOMEN RAN FIFTH AVENUE: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion by Julie Satow. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Julie Satow.
