For nearly 50 years, Betty Halbreich ran a personal-shopping office on the third floor of Bergdorf Goodman. Dubbed “the most famous personal shopper in the world” by New York magazine, she worked with people—from Betty Ford and Babe Paley to Lauren Bacall and Meryl Streep—as well as productions, such as Sex and the City and Gossip Girl. In her office, Halbreich kept a board with photos of her friends and clients, including Lena Dunham. Before Halbreich’s death, on August 24, she completed her third book, No One Has Seen It All, which will be published on April 8. Excerpted here is Dunham’s loving foreword.
For those of us lucky enough to have known Betty Halbreich, we will never stop hearing her voice in our heads.
In fact, whether you met her once—in a dressing room at Bergdorf’s as she walked in with a neat stack of dresses you should “really give a chance because whatever you’re clinging to isn’t working,” or you said hello every morning for 40 years as she walked across Madison Avenue purposefully—Betty’s voice will never leave you. Maybe she sat beside you at a bistro in spring, giving advice with such a vibrato that you caught every word. Maybe she was across the circle in group therapy. Maybe she was your boss, your grandmother, the subject of an interview where you stayed for three hours longer than you needed to. Saying good-bye to Betty was never easy, whether it was at the end of an afternoon or at the end of a lifetime. You wanted—needed—more of what she had to offer. And so you let her take up residence as a voice in your head.
With Betty on the brain, every time you falter at the thing you love, you will be reminded that hard work keeps you young. You will think about the fact that even a woman as imposingly composed as Betty can admit to periods of deep psychic strain, of purposelessness. You will want to rise to greet the vigor of a Betty hello, even just in passing on the escalator up from the beauty floor. You will hear her telling you (kindly but firmly) that you really ought to look at getting some slacks that are better tailored to your frame.
I first met Betty in 2013, when an article about her in The New Yorker by the legendary Judith Thurman went viral for telling the story of a woman who was working—in the cutthroat world of fashion, no less—well into her 80s. It seemed like it would make an incredible television show, quirky and sweet (two words, I would learn, that were not Betty’s forte. Elegant and moral is more the vibe). I also learned—upon our first meeting, and in a profoundly important friendship that has lasted more than a decade—that Betty’s appeal, her magic, was not in her age. It was, however, in her ability to survive. We tried to write this story of survival—housewife to businesswoman, accessory to doyenne—as a series (although she told us that “nobody wants to watch a show about an 86-year-old lady, not in this America,” and, as usual, she was right).
And anyway, Betty has written her own story better than anyone else can—her years as a committed wife and mother, the personal breakdown that followed her marriage’s collapse, the re-discovery of self that came with her move into personal shopping, a niche she occupied so well not just because of her fashion sensibility (which is, like all things Betty, singular) but because of her ability to read people like books, to diagnose their needs and what fashion—what she—could do to heal them. There’s a reason she called her shingle Solutions. A prom dress was more than a prom dress. A funeral look for a cheating husband’s wake had to express multiple realities. Yes, it was about cut and fit—a sense for which Betty had honed during her daily walks through the store, touching each garment like she was squeezing the shoulder of a new friend—but it was also about storytelling, about the image we project for others and the way we need to feel when we look in the mirror.
Meeting Betty turned out to be a solution for me.
For the past 10 years, having a Betty became part of being a Lena. Whether she was extolling the healing power of work and her endless appreciation of the view from her office or counseling me through transitions and heartbreaks with the kind of tough wisdom that makes your face go red (if she didn’t know the term “read you for filth,” that’s because she invented the concept), she was redefining me.
A prom dress was more than a prom dress. A funeral look for a cheating husband’s wake had to express multiple realities.
She never gave me a makeover (although we wandered the store together, a treat not only because of her near-alphabetical knowledge of its contents but because of the greetings she exchanged with every employee, the delight they took in her presence). In truth, she never tried, telling me that it was not her job to dim individuality but to help those who were still looking for their sartorial voice. (That being said, she still wanted me in better slacks.) But she did, over lengthy meals and transatlantic phone calls, cut to the heart of so many of the things that messed me up and tied me down. Just like she knew how the right dress can change a woman’s outlook, she understood—with a surgical precision—the exact types of pain, fear, and shame I felt. She’d felt them, too. Over tea in the Bergdorf café, she re-dressed me spiritually. I always left lighter, as if I’d shed a heavy winter coat and she’d replaced it with a crisp blazer. (All of hers were satin with surprising bejeweled details, by her beloved Libertine.)
I told her I loved her a lot, and she told me to get it together.
Her writing gives everyone the chance at those long lunches, as if she’s offering her readers the same master class in freeing oneself, meeting oneself, shedding the traditional forms of obligation that keep women from rising up to meet their potential but recognizing that it’s always something. Betty was wise but never prescriptive. Witty but never cruel. Powerful but vulnerable. A consistent work in progress, even when she’d reached an age where those who remain tend to calcify.
Just like she knew how the right dress can change a woman’s outlook, she understood—with a surgical precision—the exact types of pain, fear, and shame I felt.
I hope to make it to the peaks Betty scaled—yes, of age, of achievement, but also the peaks of self-actualization. She was the most deeply herself woman I have known. She was the Sherpa reminding me that there is always another summit but also telling me to look around. I can’t believe how much of the view I would have missed without her. Or how ugly my pants would have been.
The gift of this book is that now, no matter where you are, Betty’s voice will never leave you either.
When I first wrote this, I knew we were saying good-bye—at least in the Western conception of mortality—to Betty. I wrote something I hoped her remarkable children, Kathy and John (a powerful, taste-making New York curator and philanthropy adviser, and a volunteer firefighter and E.M.S. worker, respectively, representing the two sides of the coin of Betty’s interior life), could read to her out loud that would make clear to her the massive space she occupied in my life but didn’t touch on the idea that she was fallible, that she wasn’t going to be packing her hand luggage and leaving the hospital and heading back into the sprawling apartment—heavy on the matching florals—that she scrubbed inch by inch until the end of her life. I wrote exclusively using the word “is,” hoping that enough present tense could delay the inevitable.
It speaks to the power of someone’s life force when, at 96, their death feels like an impossibility. But Betty Halbreich went and did the impossible. And if you know anything about Betty’s life, you know that she did the impossible with a shrug.
She started every call with “What am I going to do with you, child?” and ended with “Come by soon, I’m almost [insert upcoming age], you know.”
Her last message to me read:
My Dear So Intelligent Lena,
miss your voice. The book is being edited. It was easy so I hope it’s not boring!
Also are you ever coming “home” this summer?
Love you Anyway,
Betty
I will miss that escalator up to her office, the royal greetings she received as she mounted the floors from handbags to the designer-shoe salon until finally you found yourself on THREE: advanced designer collections and Solutions by Betty Halbreich.
I will miss the surprising intensity of her hugs, how her birdlike frame could squeeze harder than men three times her size.
I will miss dialing her 212 number, waiting for that stern “child,” and I will miss knowing she is walking toward Fifth Avenue in the morning and away from it at night.
But as long as there is Bergdorf’s, as long as there is a Fifth Avenue, as long as there is an isle of Manhattan and as long as there is a “child,” Betty will be here. She’s probably passing the hot-dog stand right now, with a wave that says, “I have places to be.”
There is such beauty to someone dying at the age that dying is meant for, and knowing that they really did it all—the good, the bad, and the glamorous. Everything feels wrong, even though nothing is wrong. This is a celebration, but I cannot help noticing dust everywhere.
No One Has Seen It All: Lessons for Living Well from Nearly a Century of Good Taste, by Betty Halbreich, will be available from Running Press on April 8, 2025
Lena Dunham is a writer, director, actress, and producer
