Tall, auburn-haired Dorothy Shaver began her career with rag dolls. Last week, from her $75,000-a-year job, she went to greater riches. She was elected the first woman president of Fifth Avenue's smart Lord & Taylor, to succeed Walter Hoving, president.
Her success was due to a personality of opposites. Her father's family of lawyers gave her a tough masculine mind; her mother's family of artists a highly feminine creative touch. In her 22 years at Lord & Taylor's she used them both to advantage. Under the team of Hoving & Shaver, Lord & Taylor became one of the nation's swank stores. And Dorothy Shaver became one of Manhattan's top purveyors of fashion.
The Little Shavers. She had a backwoods start. Born in 1897 in Center Point, Ark., she was saved ("fortuitously") from an elopement at 18, whisked off to the University of Arkansas. At the University of Chicago, she studied art with her sister, Elsie. Next year, the two sisters were in New York. One day Dorothy suggested to Elsie that she design a doll, for commercial sale. "It might make us a fortune," she thought. Elsie produced five fanciful little creatures, which they called the Five Little Shavers.
Lord & Taylor heard about it and sent four strapping men to see the Five Little Shavers. Impressed, they took the dolls back to Lord & Taylor, and the public took to the dolls. Sentimental women fondly carried them around under their arms as mascots.
Then the sisters opened a shop, Elsie designing, Dorothy managing. Impressed again, Lord & Taylor reached out for Dorothy, put her in charge of its Comparative Shopping Bureau. She reorganized it top & bottom, got rid of the dingy "spy system," put in a Bureau of Stylists to help buyers and improve merchandising. Most of all she plugged fashion, at first that of Paris (she staged the first exhibit in America of modern French decorative art). Then she turned her attention from Paris and battled for recognition of American fashion and design.
The Big Shaver. For the most part she has created her own jobs. In quick succession, she was appointed to the Board of Directors, made vice president, then first V.P. in charge of displays, merchandising, public relations.
As a career woman, Dorothy Shaver professes to believe that every woman should marry eventually. But she prefers to remain wedded to her work, takes time out only for such things as the New Year's Egg Nog party for employes in Lord & Taylor's executive offices (see cut).
Last week, as retiring Walter Hoving prepared to undertake what he mysteriously described as "an amalgamation of department stores and other retail properties" outside New York, Lord & Taylor announced that plans would go forward for expansion inside the city limits. It will open ten branches in outlying metropolitan districts, a new uptown Fifth Avenue store, close to Rockefeller Center and Best & Co.'s new store. In carrying out this expansion, Dorothy Shaver will have the help of able Van Buren Sims, first vice president. What Dorothy Shaver's uptown store will look like, no outsider knows. But New Yorkers will expect a fashion treat.