Bergdorf Blondes - The Book and Its Context

The Book and Its Context

Bergdorf Blondes is a satirical miscellany of high fashion and style a few years into the 21st century – three years after the September 11 attacks on New York, an event which is mentioned once, but impinges not at all. Its style of narration is similar to that of Carrie Bradshaw in Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City (HBO 1998-2004), to which some reviewers saw Bergdorf Blondes as a successor.

As a story about an English woman moving in fashionable circles in New York, the narrator (“moi”), whose “personal bible” is Anita Loos’ novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), appears to owe something to Sykes herself. The other main character is her best friend, Julie Bergdorf (“the biggest princess of them all”), who is heir to the real-life Bergdorf Goodman store, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. This was founded in 1899 by Herman Bergdorf, an Alsatian immigrant from whom Edwin Goodman purchased it in 1906. The journalist Ariel Leve wrote that Bergdorf Goodman "is like a five-star hotel ... You feel like you're spending money by simply breathing". Sykes has said that Julie Bergdorf was “slightly inspired” by the retail heiress Elizabeth Woolworth.

Julie is rumoured to have her hair coloured at Bergdorf every thirteen days; hence, the eponymous term, “Bergdorf blondes” (or "BBs"), for those who are able to emulate its precise colour, which is likened to that of the late Carolyn Bessette Kennedy (1966–99). When Julie feels unable to bide her time for a particular fashion accessory, such as a Hermès Birkin bag, for which there is a three-year wait, she shoplifts from the family store – “kind of stealing from yourself”.