Buyer and Director of Haute Couture Salone for Bergdorf Goodman
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/digital-library/exhibits/glamour-and-innovation-the-women-behind-the-seams-of-fashion-at-the-white-house/ethel-frankau
1886-1971
New York, Florence
Ethel Frankau was born in January 1886 in New York City. Her parents were close friends of Edwin Goodman, founder of the department store chain Bergdorf Goodman. In 1914, Goodman saw the clothes she had designed, and, impressed, offered her a job.
The following year, Ethel Frankau participated in the first of a long series of trips that will take her first to Paris and, later also to Italy, with the aim of selecting and buying European haute couture clothing models.
After the war she already appears as director of Bergdorf Goodman's Haute Couture Salon. In that capacity, in 1951 she participated on behalf of the chain in the First Italian High Fashion Show Iorganized by Giovanni Battista Giorgini in Florence.
Over the following years, Frankau participated in all major fashion shows organized in Florence, Rome and Milan, contributing to launch a number of Italian brands and designers overseas. She said once that the four fashion revolutions in, which she took part included her contribution to promote the design of Elsa Schiaparelli as early as the 1930s.
She died of leukemia on June 26, 1971, after sixty years at the service of Bergdorf Goodman.
Related Vectors
Giovanni Battista Giorgini
imprenditore
Bergdorf Goodman
Julia Trissel
Buyer of Bergdorf Goodman
First Italian High Fashion Show
Fashion show
Elsa Schiaparelli
Fashion Designer
New York
Jessica Daves
editor
Sources
“Ethel Frankacau, 85, a Director of Haute Couture Salon, Dies.” The New York Times, June 27, 1971.
Joe Aisling, "Bergdorf Goodman's Supreme Court Justice of Fashion: A Chronology of Ethel Frankau's Career, 1914-1967," MA Diss., Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, 2015.
"Glamour and Innovation: Ethel Frankau," in The White House Historical Association (https://www.whitehousehistory.org/galleries/glamour-and-innovation-ethel-frankau)