Filer-Machol: Couturier to "Our Crowd"

Volume 34
Fall-Winter
2008

Return to Table of Contents

A customer first viewed the shop’s offerings in the front room. After making her selections, she was led to one of the mirrored dressing rooms that were almost as large as today’s studio apartments. A seamstress, her bosom glittering with pins, was summoned to raise the garment’s shoulders, let the waist out, or refashion the sleeves to achieve a perfect fit.

Mari S. Gold has written for the New York Times, American Profile, Relish, TravelSmart, Indianapolis Monthly, and numerous e-zines. An avid cook and foodie, she contributes restaurant reviews to Zagat guides and the Vermont News Guide and is working on a young adult novel with a food theme. She divides her time between New York City, where she is director of communications for a major healthcare organization, and Dorset, Vermont.

New York Folklore Society
P.O. Box 764
Schenectady, NY 12301
518/346-7008
Fax 518/346-6617
nyfs@nyfolklore.org

Filer-Machol: Couturier to Our Crowd

Today, 747 Madison Avenue, between 64th and 65th streets in the heart of Manhattan’s luxury shopping district, is the home of the uber-elegant Italian boutique Valentino. The 747 Madison I remember was a slightly dingy brownstone where two floors housed Filer-Machol, a specialty shop that catered largely to well-to-do German-Jewish women. A single street-level window displayed one dress on a headless mannequin; silk curtains discretely masked the interior, where the loudest sound was the whisper of silk.

Alice Hahn Machol, c. 1935. Photo courtesy of the author.

Filer-Machol opened in the early 1930s, when my maternal grandmother, Alice Hahn Machol, determined to remake the money she had lost in the stock market crash. Although she had no training, Alice instinctively grasped the principals of marketing and formulated a strategy.

She understood the desire for private, ultra-personalized shopping among her “our crowd” coterie, descendents of the educated, largely professional German Jews who settled in New York and other parts of the United States shortly before the Civil War. Assimilated as she was, Alice was hugely proud of her German heritage. During World War II, when pressured to anglicize her husband’s name from “Katzenberg” to “Katenhill,” she refused.

“That’s absurd,” she reportedly said. “Katzenberg is a fine German name. We’ll keep it.”

Filer-Machol at 747 Madison Avenue, 1939. The shop was in the third building from the left, on the ground floor and second story. Photo courtesy of the New York City Municipal Archives.

Before Filer-Machol’s debut, affluent New York women shopped anonymously, trolling the aisles of large stores like Saks Fifth Avenue, Bonwit Teller, and Bergdorf Goodman. In the mid-1940s, Lord and Taylor instituted “personal shoppers,” and other stores followed suit, but selections were limited to in-store merchandise. At Filer-Machol, a woman shopped by appointment. While there, until she was ushered to her taxi or chauffeured car, she was the epicenter of attention, selecting from dresses, suits, and coats gathered specifically with regard to her taste, size, and planned social engagements.

To manage the business side of the operation, and probably to raise additional start-up cash, Alice persuaded Edith Filer to join her as a partner. A sharp contrast to gregarious Alice who adored parties and usually wore a diamond pin from her pre-crash collection, Filer (as Alice always called her) had a stout, square body, silver hair pulled into a tight bun, and only wore black. She rented the space, installed the store’s only telephone in her office, and paid the bills.

Natalie Machol Sour in fron to Filer-Machol

The author’s mother, Natalie Machol Sour, in front of Filer-Machol, 1940. Photo courtesy of the author.

To enhance the illusion that shopping was a quasi-social function, Alice decorated Filer-Machol’s spacious entrance like a living room, with upholstered chairs and sofas in floral prints set on a pinky-beige carpet. With the help of her banker—also a woman—she established credit on Seventh Avenue and began buying. She publicized the shop entirely by word of mouth, relying on friends and fellow members of the Harmonie Club on East 60th Street and Sunningdale Country Club in Scarsdale, both bastions of German Jews. (Technically, Alice wasn’t a member of either organization as membership was reserved for men: the member in the family was her second husband, Milton R. Katzenberg, chairman of the New York Hide Exchange.)

A customer first viewed the shop’s offerings in the front room. After making her selections, she was led to one of the mirrored dressing rooms that were almost as large as today’s studio apartments. A seamstress, her bosom glittering with pins, was summoned to raise the garment’s shoulders, let the waist out, or refashion the sleeves to achieve a perfect fit. After the final alternation, the customer departed. Money hadn’t changed hands and often wasn’t mentioned. A few days later, signature Filer-Machol boxes—heavy green cardboard printed with yellow and white daisies and a gray-and-white art deco label— arrived at the customer’s home. Inside lay the tissue-stuffed garments, pressed and ready to hang in the closet. The bill came separately, often sent directly to the client’s father or husband.

The author’s mother, Natalie Machol Sour, in front of Filer-Machol, 1940. Photo courtesy of the author.

The author’s mother, Natalie Machol Sour, in front of Filer-Machol, 1940. Photo courtesy of the author.

Filer-Machol’s services didn’t come cheap. According to Vogue magazines from 1947 and ’48, a Claire McCardle faille crepe pleated dress cost $70.00; a Ceil Chapman dinner dress, $110.00; and an Adele Simpson three-piece suit with a matching blouse, $195.00—designers and garments comparable to the shop’s merchandise. In this era, a non-designer suit could be had for $25.00 and an Elizabeth Arden manicure enjoyed for $3.00.

I was also a beneficiary of Filer- Machol’s skilled seamstresses, one of few pudgy preteens in meticulously fitted clothes. Friends teased me when I had to “go for a fitting,” and I found having a woman kneel at my feet to pin a straight hem horribly embarrassing. I complained to both my mother and grandmother but was overruled.

Alice Machol Katzenberg holding her granddaughter in 1940

The author’s mother, Natalie Machol Sour, in front of Filer-Machol, 1940. Photo courtesy of the author.

When my mother, Natalie, withdrew from Goucher College in 1929 because Alice couldn’t meet her tuition bills, she needed to work. Filer-Machol was the logical venue, but to acquire necessary seasoning, both Filer and Alice insisted she train “in the field.” That’s how my mother’s career in fashion began: behind the hosiery counter at Lord and Taylor, and then selling toys at Macy’s in the Christmas rush.

“Grueling,” she said, when I asked what working at Macy’s was like.

“I stood for hours without a break while customers fought over stuffed animals.”

When she finally reached Seventh Avenue, Natalie was befriended by designers like Ben Zuckerman, Mollie Parnis, and Pauline Trigère who gave her a pair of gold turtle pins I still own. Mom was readily accepted by the inner circle, partly because she was charming, but also because she wore the designers’ clothes with flair. As a teenager, accompanying my mother on her buying rounds, I heard her speak German to those designers who also knew the language.

“I learned to speak German before English,” she told me. “Whenever my parents didn’t want me to know what they were talking about, they spoke German. That was all it took to make me learn it.” During the original run of South Pacific, my mother—known as Miss Machol despite being married with a daughter—called on Mary Martin with an armload of dresses and sold her a few, but most of her customers were friends or friends of friends. Each evening, our phone rang constantly with clients updating her on their social schedules so that the “right” dresses would be on hand for their next appointment.

Filer-Machol retained Gusso Kahn and Company, an advertising agency, largely to place classified ads for “alteration hands.” Clothes from the shop occasionally made it into a newspaper feature, but publicity was considered slightly vulgar. The shop’s reputation grew almost entirely from personal recommendations, catering to several hundred women a year at its peak in the 1940s and ’50s. Besides Filer, my grandmother, and my mother, who became a partner in the early forties, the staff included three “mature” saleswomen and roughly ten seamstresses. Men were never seen on the premises; deliveries and workers like carpenters or plumbers came after the close of business.

By the late 1960s, after the deaths of both my grandmother and mother, Filer-Machol closed. I wasn’t interested in the business, and fashion had changed as women became consumed with designer labels, instead of identifying clothes by their source, as in “this dress came from Filer-Machol.” Individualized service grew increasingly costly; the Age of Aquarius popularized jeans and miniskirts, and many newly working women dressed in homogeneous business suits. Now, all that remains of Filer-Machol is a charming memory, a shopper’s Brigadoon— but my early training held. I still have clothes altered so the hem hangs perfectly straight.

“Filer-Machol: Couturier to "Our Crowd" by Mari S. Gold was published in Voices Vol. 34, Fall-Winter 2008. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.