Loehmann’s, the New York City-based discount department store that had a devoted — and deeply Jewish — fan base, is set to make a return later this month.
Now under new ownership after closing for good in 2014, Loehmann’s will relaunch as a series of pop-up stores, beginning with a warehouse sale at Tanger Outlets at Deer Park on Long Island on Aug. 22, the New York Post reports. Future pop-ups are planned in Florida and New York City.
The iconic brand, founded by former department store buyer Frieda Loehmann and her son Charles in Brooklyn in 1921, went bankrupt in 2013. It was purchased in 2020 another company famous for its cut-price fashion deals: New York retail giant Century 21, which was founded by the Gindi family in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in 1961, and is still run by the Syrian Jewish family today.
Like Loehmann’s, Century 21 has also faced headwinds in recent years. The department store filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy during the COVID-19 pandemic but was able to recover within a few years, opening new locations in 2021 and 2022. The flagship store in Lower Manhattan, which closed in 2020, was able to reopen in 2023.
Though Loehmann’s wasn’t owned or established by Jews, the off-price retailer has long been associated with the Jewish community. “Everyone thought she was Jewish, though she came from German-Lutheran stock,” Jane Leavy wrote of Frieda Loehmann in the Washington Post in 1987. “She had learned just enough Yiddish to get by in the garment district.”
The experience of shopping at Loehmann’s — and its dreaded open dressing room — became a tradition for generations of American Jews, as our friends at Kveller documented earlier this year.
“No matter what teenage drama I was going through, Loehmann’s was always there to deliver the perfect weekend bat mitzvah dress,” a reader named Jessica told Kveller.
“When I was around my mother and her friends, all Jewish housewives, it seemed to always come up in conversations,” Annie wrote to Kveller. “Someone was invariably wearing an admired piece of attire purchased at Loehmann’s. I never heard my gentile friends talking about shopping at Loehmann’s with their aunts or moms. Once you got to a certain age shopping there almost felt like a rite of passage into Jewish womanhood.”
The store was repeatedly mentioned in the 1990s hit sitcom “The Nanny” as the titular character Fran Fine’s favorite store, and was part of a plotline in a season 4 episode where she fights with another woman over a sweater during the “Semiannual Red Star Clearance Sale.” The character of Fran, a middle-class, Jewish girl from Flushing (played by Jewish actor and current president of the SAG-AFTRA union Fran Drescher) was always dressed in pricey designer clothes, which the character explained away as having purchased on sale — often from Loehmann’s.
At its height, Loehmann’s had around 100 stores throughout the country. Its closure 11 years ago was devastating to many, who recalled shopping with their bubbes or and making their husbands or fathers wait in the seats outside the dressing room.
“I think it was Loehmann’s heavily Jewish demographic that it catered to in its origins,” Ann told Kveller. “Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Fordham Road in the Bronx — before the generations of Jews that were able to afford and be accepted into the finer aspects of society, Loehmann’s gave first and second generations a way to participate in the American dream of consumerism. And, like many traditions born in necessity, it evolved into a kind of badge of courage. Modern generations of Jews didn’t need to shop there, but like Tevye the Milkman says: ‘Tradition!’”
Century 21 is banking on the brand’s resilience at a time when IRL shopping is under even greater pressure than it was a decade ago.
“Loehmann’s continues to rank high as a retail destination that consumers recall, admire [and] want to patronize,” Larry Mentzer, Century 21’s chief operating officer, told the New York Post about the relaunch.
“As other retailers contract,” Mentzer added, now is “the time for a re-imagined Loehmann’s.”
A website for the resurrected store gives very little information about what will be on offer, though the Post reports that the initial two-week warehouse sale on Long Island will also include Loehmann’s iconic “Back Room,” which, in its prime, “featured deeply marked-down luxury brands from Michael Kors, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Fendi, Oscar de la Renta, Marc Jacobs among others.”
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