When just about everybody who was anybody in Dallas suddenly began sleeping on candy-striped bed sheets three years ago, they had a reasonable explanation : "Mr. Stanley said it was the thing to do." Mr. Stanley is Stanley Marcus, 48, president of the famed Neiman-Marcus luxury specialty store, and the benevolent dictator of fashion not only for Dallas but for the whole Southwest. He has made himself so mainly by superb showmanship and a solemn dedication to his job that causes competitors to refer waspishly to Neiman's as "The Cathedral."
Last week Showman Marcus put on his biggest show of the year— his 16th annual Fall Fashion Exposition, in which the store had invested $50,000 and 12,000 man-hours of labor. By the shrewd device of awarding "Distinguished Service" plaques to outstanding designers, Mr. Stanley, as usual, had brought headline names* scurrying to Dallas from all over the world. Many another headliner came from distant points just to bid for the privilege of paying $12.50 (turned over to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts) to be among the 1,000 paying guests in the first-night audience.
(Tickets sold out so fast that even Mrs.
H. L. Hunt, wife of Texas' multimillionaire oilman, had to take second-night seating.) To his dazzled guests, Mr. Stanley showed $4,500,000 worth of new wares, including $500,000 worth of furs, $350,000 worth of dresses (three Charles James models were priced at $2,000 each), and $3,500,000 Neiman-Marcus' sales soared. Many of the guests had brought lavishly even before the show, just to be sure they had the proper things to wear on opening night.
Golden Fleece. With just such a combination of showmanship and salesmanship, Stanley Marcus has helped build Neiman-Marcus sales from $2,600,000 a year in 1926, the year he joined the family sales force, to their present $20 million level. He now hopes to boost them 25% with the new $7,500,000 addition to the main store (he opened a new $1,600,000 suburban branch in 1951).
Like his three younger brothers, Eddie, 43, Herbert Jr., 39, and Lawrence, 36, Mr. Stanley still likes to handle sales to special customers. When one East Texan could not think of what to buy his nine womenfolk, Stanley Marcus suggested nine $750 coats made of vicuña ("fleece of the Andes"), the costliest cloth on earth.
"That's a danged good idea," said the industrialist, "and I'll have one too." The store has since made the coat so popular that once, when it put $150,000 worth of coats in a window display, it sold out in a few days.