JIM BRADSHAW: Lafayette had its own connoisseur of fashion

Fashionable folk in New York City can still shop for an Easter bonnet “with all the frills upon it,” as the song goes, in a store founded by the man for whom Lafayette’s Bendel Gardens subdivision is named. He is long dead, but the store, just down Fifth Avenue from Trump Tower, still sells the Henri Bendel brand of purses, jewelry and fashion accessories.
Henri Willis Bendel was born in Lafayette (then Vermilionville) on Jan, 22, 1868. As a child he was raised in an apartment above the general mercantile store owned by his parents, William Louis and Mary Plonsky Bendel. William was a native of Austria; Mary was born in Prussia. They apparently came to the United States separately and met and married in New Orleans in 1863.
They came to Vermilionville shortly after their marriage to open the general store that was the first of a number of businesses that eventually covered an entire block of the town. They included a furniture store, undertaking parlor, an opera house, and a horse- and mule-trading business.
Both the Bendel and Plonsky families were Jewish, but young Henri was sent to study at the Jesuit-run St. Charles College in Grand Coteau because it offered the best education available in the area at the time. Henri converted to Christianity either as a student or shortly after finishing his studies there.
After graduation, he worked for two years as a clerk at the Hiller Plantation Store near Raceland, then for another several years at a store in New Orleans. When he thought he was ready to go into business for himself, he borrowed $1,500 from his mother and opened a ladies’ ready-to-wear shop in Morgan City. The business was just getting on its feet when a fire wiped him out.
That was when he decided to try New York City, possibly because he’d met and become infatuated with New Yorker Blanche Lehman while she was visiting friends in Morgan City. They were married in 1894.
His first venture in New York was a millinery shop that failed when his partner ran off with all the money. He opened another store, this time without a partner, and suffered a disaster of a different sort. Blanche died in childbirth in July 1895 and the child also was lost.
According to a brief biography by Alvin Bethard (“Henri Bendel, Connoisseur of Style,” Attakapas Gazette, Volume 26, 83-86), “Deeply bereaved by the loss of his wife and child, Bendel channeled all of his time and energy into his business.”
The rich and fashionable began to take notice of his hats and “wealthy socialites . . . began to patronize his shop,” according to Bethard’s account. “He also sold hats to exclusive women’s apparel stores.”
As his business and list of fashionable patrons grew, Bendel “developed a keen sense of what the New York woman wanted,” Bethard writes. “This led to the addition of a complete line of women’s apparel, most of which he designed himself.”
He became a giant in the fashion business and a wealthy man. In New York, he lived in a Park Avenue apartment; sometimes he retreated to his 40-room mansion in Connecticut, He sold his chateau in Long Neck, Long Island, to auto magnate Walter Chrysler and opened an office and bought an apartment in Paris. That’s where he opened a laboratory to create Bendel-labeled perfumes and soaps.
He was the first retailer to have his own fragrance, to offer in-store makeovers, and to stage his own fashion show. He is also credited with developing the shop-within-a-shop merchandising concept that’s still in use in some department stores. He packaged his merchandise in distinctive brown-and-white striped boxes that are still identified with the company.
In 1927 he bought 213 arpents on the Vermilion River to build a pleasant place to stay when he visited his old home town. It became known as Bendel Gardens after he’d had it landscaped with azaleas and camellias, but he apparently never built a home there. His heirs subdivided the property in the 1950s.
Henri Bendel died in New York from a heart attack on March 22, 1936. He had designed the mausoleum in which he was interred in Kenison Cemetery on Long Island.
He left an estate of $1.2 million, the equivalent of about $20 million today, a respectable sum in the 1930s, when the Great Depression was in full sway.
An imposing bronze and granite sculpture, “Angel and Mourner,” marks the graves of his parents in the Jewish cemetery at the corner of Lee and University avenues in Lafayette.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbrad-shaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.