The Church of I. Magnin
A Beachtown Bohemian pilgrimage to "The City" meant a visit to the late great West Coast department store, I. Magnin
Growing up in a sleepy beach town, it was an event to drive up to San Francisco to visit I. Magnin, the elegant department store on Union Square. My mother, a native New Yorker, was well versed in luxury shopping: as her only child, I’d been raised conscious that proper retail glamour existed only in big cities. Bonwit Teller, Bergdorf Goodman, and Henri Bendel were names I heard her drop with deference in conversation as if they were distant cousins living back east. As kind and generous as she was, there was no extracting my mother’s inherent snobbery from her gestalt. Despite living on incredibly modest means, I was educated from a ripe age in a precise hegemonic order of department stores. She scoffed at the notion of Macy’s: “common.” Goodwill was better than Macy’s in her book. There was no question who belonged at the tippy top, above Saks, above Neiman Marcus: it was always I. Magnin. The original I. Magnin store had been founded in San Francisco after the gold rush, and by the early 20th Century had opened locations across the west in communities with a critical mass of chic women: Palo Alto, Carmel, Pasadena, etc. I. Magnin set a very specific tone. This tone was a blend of refined, airy, arty, understated and cool. If I. Magnin were a woman, she would be a mysterious Hitchcock blonde with kid driving gloves, a recipe for salmon mousse in her wallet and Modern Jazz Quartet on her turntable.
It was the early 1980s and we’d dress up for the two-hour drive up to San Francisco from Santa Cruz. My mother would wear a black knit dress, dowdy low-heeled Ferragamos, and a suffocating amount of perfume. She’d mandate that I wear my ‘airplane dress’: a blue Florence Eiseman day dress with white peter pan collar and patent leather mary janes. I felt the urbane ghost of my mother’s New York City roots follow us as we drove up the two lane coast route, Highway 1. Ocean on your left, fields of strawberry and artichokes, and rolling golden hills of oak on your right. She’d pop in a Bobby Short cassette, recorded live at The Carlyle or something, as we passed the contrast of the familiar coastal agricultural fields, the Odwalla juice plant in Davenport, little fishing towns with taquerias and bait shops, the exurbs of San Francisco with their pastel ticky-tacky townhouses until were spat, just past the hookers and strip clubs of the Tenderloin, into Union Square’s immaculate, polished city blocks. Immediately I’d note the twinkle in her eye. I. Magnin, this hallowed destination, was always our first, and sometimes our only, stop. Visiting I. Magnin was an education for me, a beach town kid, in how exquisite an experience shopping could be.
It was easy to spot I. Magnin on the square. Theirs was the only edifice with an unembellished, stripped-down façade. Oversized boxy glass windows punctuated a crisp light grey stone -- no frilly bits or ornamentation. The I. MAGNIN logo sat like a crown on the building’s head in a sinewy type reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley illustrations: thin and curving and expensive. Every other building on the square seemed either cheap, or rococo in comparison.
Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanan was described in The Great Gatsby as having “money in her voice”; I. Magnin knew the same could be said for scent. Stepping inside the front doors of I. Magnin you were enveloped in a bouquet so all pervasive, it would be embedded in the shopping bag you brought home. (I’d stick my head inside it’s tissue paper and inhale.) Neatly coiffed women stood behind the glove and makeup counters, examining customers as they walked past. In my head, they stood in judgement: they either approved of your attire or didn’t. The elevator bank, which was gold and massive like an Egyptian tomb, was straight to the back. Mother always took us directly to the ladies lingerie department.
The lingerie department is the part of the store that is seared into my memory. It was a transformative space to visit again and again. The generous rooms felt pale and soft like a ballet shoe, with light carpeting, beige-pink upholstery, subtle lighting. It was so spacious that one never really felt the presence of other shoppers. The room was sparingly merchandized -- a rack of little quilted bed jackets, for example, stood out on satin hangers and shone like jewels under spot lighting. There were silky bedroomy caftans, velour lounge sets, matching pajama and bathrobes, nightgowns and lacy bras and panties. The Lingerie department at I. Magnin was a visual school for young girls in the power of female seduction, elegance, and pride in grooming. All without uttering a word. Sitting in this pink cocoon watching my mother peruse the floor, I could not wait to grow up and become a catlike goddess of desire. Experiencing I. Magnin served as a dramatic foil to the surfer-babe waitresses all my friends and I admired back in Santa Cruz waiting tables at the harbor café. This urbane, elevated place spoke of another California, and another world of feminine aspiration. To be inaugurated in this private ladies club at was truly a privilege, even though we could never really afford to buy anything there. The store closed down by the mid 1990s and an army of beautiful women across the west coast shed a collective tear onto their Evan Piccone pant suits.
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