The End of Saks

We like to surround ourselves with intimations of luxury.  Whether that fills you with anxiety or a sense of security is a matter of the moment and personal status.  But when it all goes away, when all you see is the skeleton beneath, what do you feel?

Saks Fifth Avenue, Chicago:
1929 at Michigan and Chestnut (left); 1935-1990, 669 North Michigan (right)
(images courtesy Nena's Notes)

Saks Fifth Avenue came to Chicago almost a century ago, in 1929.  It moved to what is now Niketown six years later, and, half a century on, to it's long-time, final home at 700 North Michigan.  It was anchor to a massive 1990 development, Chicago Place, a 42-story tower with 233 apartments above a 320,000 square-foot vertical shopping mall, to which Saks, with about a quarter of the space, was the department store anchor.  Emulating Marshall Fields, that still wasn't enough; their men's store was across the street.

Although there was still a lot of empty space at the time of opening, developers were optimistic of a quick fill-out, maybe even a Barney's to be added to the mix.  And while Chicago Place did fill out, it never met that initial promise, a third wheel to the majors Water Tower Place and 900 North Michigan just blocks up the street.  Like the joke of how you go bankrupt - slowly, and then all at once - Chicago Place went into painful decline.  The wonderful, upscale Bockwinkel's grocery in the basement folded early on, and more empty storefronts, dead behind the eyes, followed.  

[Read: Dead Mall Walking]

Then, in 2009, the mall was acquired for a bargain-basement $39,000,000, and the new owners pulled the plug for conversion into office space.  Saks, the anchor, was now sole survivor, having already pulled back the men's store into the mothership.

And there matters stood, as department stores fell out of fashion and bricks-and-mortar retail shriveled under the onslaught of Amazon and buying stuff on the internet. Water Tower Place shed anchors Macy's and Lord & Taylor, closed its food court, and now is about to shrink under a major rehab.  Somehow 900 North Michigan - and maybe the far newer Shops at North Bridge, anchored by Nordstrom's - seem to be doing fine.

Saks was not immune.  Owned by former Canadian department store powerhouse Hudson's Bay, in December of 2024 it spent $2.7 billion acquiring troubled luxury rival Neiman Marcus.  Little more than a year later, in January of this year, like two drowning swimmers dragging each other under the waves, the combined retailer filed for bankruptcy, announcing a wave of closings, including the Saks in Chicago Place, which happens to be right across the street from Chicago's Neiman Marcus which, for the moment, is last man standing.

Saks has only days to live, but it's already a corpse waiting to get itself buried.  The sparse selection of actual merchandise is overwhelmed by a closeout of art, furniture, fixtures and extension cords.  The medium of photography has allowed us to witness with dread the dance macabre of how even the greatest beauties wrinkle, age and die.  The current state of Saks infers something similar, although in reality it was always less a matchless beauty than a carefully appointed machine for selling expensive goods through the allure of luxury.  In department store years, Saks has had a long life, and now, in the final stretch, you can see how much it was held together at the end by botched surgeries and too much make-up.

"Going to the mall" used to be our solace, our safe place when the outside world turned anxious. Rem Koolhass famously wrote an entire spectacular, brilliant book about it, just before the phenomenon was about to begin its decline. In the present unstable moment, our psyches under constant assault from the capricious, destructive actions of madmen, we've strangely decided to continue weaning ourselves from the social consolation of shopping malls, our drug of choice, for the isolating, impersonal world of the on-line, the algorithms of AI feeding both our desires and their assuagement.   

For me, a simple lower-middle-class peasant, Saks Fifth Avenue was never my world, but walking this Die tote Stadt, stripped to its remnants like the twigs of Lavinia's hands, I feel both afraid and queasily at home.

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Dark Satanic Mills Descend on Boul Mich. Resuscitation to follow?

[Postscript: 12/10/14] Crain's Chicago Business reported that the Allsaints store would be replaced by a T-Mobile flagship store.

 click images for larger view (recommended)

It began, not all that long ago, like this . . .

. . . the soaring entrance to the spectacularly unsuccessful Chicago Place vertical mall on North Michigan Avenue, done up in a style that might best be called Prairie School meets glitz generic.  It was finally put out of its misery about two decades later.  Dominating the entrance were two 42-foot-high murals by Thomas Melvin, depicting Chicago in broad strokes and superbright colors . . .

This is what the same wall looks like now . . .

It's part of the just opened Chicago outpost of AllSaints Spitalfields, the British clothier.  Like Chicago Place, it was born in the 1990's, but there the comparison ends.  By the time it opened, Chicago Place was upholding traditions that were already dead; AllSaints was defining what was to come.

our mission is to create a brand that blends cultural, fashion and music into a potent formula of desirable clothing that expresses individuality and attitude.

AllSaints doesn't advertise, depending instead on word-of-mouth, and it keeps in place a kind of corporate omerta about itself.  Staff is forbidden to speak about the business - you can make up a far better back story for the Mise-en-scène in your own head.  One description of the chain's design mantra is "crumpled fabrics and clothes that often to the untrained eye might appear to be lopsided."

The design of the new 11,000-square-foot Chicago flagship is surreal and spectacular - Dickensian Gothic.   It's been described as being modeled "after an industrial European rail station," but it seems much more like an abandoned factory, scrubbed to a high polish that never existed in its original incarnation.  According to a great account by Tim Girvin of the evolution of the Allfields Spitalfields brand and design of its Seattle outpost . . .

“The All Saints store is an expensive monument to the distressed style of decoration: the brickwork is exposed, the wood flooring carefully aged.” According to friends working as the architects of record for the Seattle location, the concept of detailing that degradation is one of careful staging — teams working for weeks on the blasting and chiseling of every single brick. All Saints Spitalfields becomes in this light, a kind of set design, a cinematic production.

In place of the Mag Mile's long-faded pretensions to high elegance, we get a massive heavy-metal denture jammed into the untoothed maw of a Po-Mo relic. 

The entrance is framed in ancient-looking black steel beams and columns, beaded with bolts, and framing distressed brick, also painted black.

The same brick, unpainted, sides the 42-foot-high entrance foyer.  It's all dominated by the back wall, a soaring-to-the-ceiling grid of hundreds of antique Singer sewing machines. Along with the ram's horn, they're signature motifs of the chain and its fashions.

The selling space beyond has the same distressed brick walls, even on the tall, squat columns.  Bolted metal pilasters climb up the walls, to a metal molding course topped by squat brackets.  Furnishings are similarly retro-industrial - heavy metal tables, often wheels of uncertain function, interlocking gears in framed black panels mounted high up on the walls, an iPad held in place by a thick, thumb-screwed wood block.  Everything has been painted a light buff.  As with most of the apparel on display, the palette is so constrained you feel as if you've fallen into sepia.

Today, sewing machines tend of be not black but white, but the basic principles of manufacturing remain in the factories in China and other developing countries where almost all the clothing we buy is made.  Perhaps a century from now, we'll be purchasing our apparel in stores designed in a kind of nostalgic replication of the typical contemporary industrial setting  you can see here.

Retailing as stage set, of course, is nothing new.  A century ago, department stores attracted their newly-middle-class customers with palatial architecture and furnishings, repackaging the gilded age luxury of the robber barons for the mass market.

In the 1920's, movie theater operators brought in audiences with the fantasy of having been given the keys to an Egyptian temple or the Palace of Versailles, examples of an authoritarian world order in which the middle class was limited to the bureaucracy serving the royal court.  Now we've apparently graduated to a super-scrubbed, nostalgic recreation of a brutal industrial past that our ancestors struggled at great sacrifice to transcend.

"And other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"  Comedy=tragedy+time.  Certainly a parallel formula holds true for high-end retailing.  As brutal as the early industrial age may appear to us now, at the time - to capitalist and laborer alike - it was an age of optimism, of moving beyond the Malthusian uncertainty of rural life.

AllSaints Spitalsfield could be a mainstay or a fad.  Just this past May, running dry of cash after having been owned successively by an Icelandic firm that failed, and then a leading Icelandic bank, that also failed, the company was acquired by British private equity firm Lion Capital.

In either case, they'll be plenty of time later to mine the deeper, darker meanings of AllSaint's Terry Gilliam/Mark Romanek vision of the perfect selling space.  For now, be sure to check out the trippy architectural concoction that has Potter Palmer and Arthur Rubloff turning over in their graves.  But then again, Rubloff was always a snappy dresser . . .