Farewell to Filene’s Basement

It was there, at the flagship of the now-defunct discount retailer, on Washington Street in Boston, that I scored my Madame X gown: black velvet with the one (rhinestone) shoulder strap, marked down to $19 and not only gorgeous, but from I. Magnin. That was a magical name, light-years removed from the Basement chain, which recently closed, sunk into bankruptcy.

My mother saw the dress first. She grabbed for it, microseconds ahead of another shopper (you had to move fast in Filene’s Basement), and I tried it on, right there on the floor.

Dressing rooms? Don’t be silly. You pulled it on over your clothes and elbowed your way to a sliver of mirror, just like everyone else. And if other women eyed you and hung around, jockeying for position just in case you weren’t buying it — that was when you knew you had a winner.

I wore that gown to my junior prom and my senior prom and a couple of Harvard proms. That rhinestone strap was mangled in the back seats of cars and mended each time to twinkle yet again, and when I graduated and came to New York to find a job, the Madame X came with me.

Even here it was a hit, and whenever anyone asked where I had bought it, I would say, in all truth, that it had come from I. Magnin.

The fever of Filene’s Basement! Once I was fighting for space at a rack filled with overstock from Saks Fifth Avenue, another magical name. A woman beside me pulled out a dress and shrieked, “My God, Mabel, look! It’s the same dress.”

She began falling backward in a faint, toward me, and I knew that I should try to catch her, but she was very fat, and I did not. It shames me still to recall that I stood by as she went down (she was unhurt; Mabel hoisted her up and away) and that I instantly pushed back into that trove of Saks dresses. Again I scored: Mollie Parnis, coatdress in black wool crepe; still works.

There was the annual one-day bridal-gown sale, only in the flagship store. Some marketing genius named it the Running of the Brides, which caused near riots and got great press coverage.

Three of us went with Bea, the first of our crowd to get engaged, to help her pick a dress. As soon as the doors opened and the madness descended, we pushed through and grabbed armloads of bridal gowns, holding them hostage for Bea to try on.

Her choice was awash in seed pearls. We stood admiring it. We swore we would all buy our wedding gowns in the Basement.

We were helping Bea out of the gown when a young woman said, “I saw it first,” and tugged at it. Bea tugged back. The tulle made a sickening sound as it ripped. Seed pearls scattered. The woman disappeared. Bea cried. She found another, and it was pretty enough, but she always mourned the one that got away.

By the time I was marrying, in the ’60s, I was gainfully employed in New York, at this newspaper in fact, and could have shopped anywhere I chose, but loyalty took me back to the Basement. (I found no wedding gown but did find what we used to call the Going-Away Dress: pink silk ombré; provenance: Saks; at $39, perfect.)

The great Basement innovation, but only at the flagship, was the automatic markdown system. Roughly every week, the price of unsold items was reduced by one-quarter. Anything unsold after a month went to charity. You would covet a jacket, and see on the sales tag that in two days it would be discounted.

The game then was to protect it from other shoppers, which you would do by shoving it stealthily onto, say, a maternity rack, or even under the rack.

You would arrive early the next two mornings to reposition your prey, if you could find it, and should you and it emerge together to close the deal at the lower price, what sweet triumph!

There was never anything that sweet at the chain’s branches, like my local one at 79th and Broadway, which was better than no Filene’s Basement but still a pallid enterprise (with dressing rooms; how pretentious) for a city where discount retail thrives.

Compared with New York, the Boston of my youth was a deeply dull town to live in. The blue laws were fierce. It sometimes felt as if anything that might be construed as fun would be reliably Banned in Boston.

But we had the Basement. That was fun. If you were a girl who loved clothes but grew up in homes where there were no dollars to spare, it was more than fun: It was heaven incarnate.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0e55e46959225e0cd10a2a922f78b849