Before the great shopping streets, mega-boutiques, and global e-commerce, there were the department stores. Once in Europe cult places for fashion lovers of the last century, also because they were the places where one could find a summary of all the best global fashion. This was doubly true for the United States, where single-brand fashion boutiques generally arrived later than in Europe. For an entire era, places like Bloomingdale’s, Barney’s, Saks Fifth Avenue were not mere retail points, but true arbiters of taste, capable of legitimizing a brand, launching it, or relegating it to the margins—yet today, Saks itself, the department store par excellence, seems to be in a far from solid position.
At the end of December, the…