Monica Hickey, Doyenne of Wedding Dresses, Dies at 100

Monica Hickey, who for decades dressed celebrities and socialites for their lavish weddings in the haute bridal salons of New York department stores Henri Bendel, Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue, died on January 26 in Valle de Elqui, Chile. She was 100.

She died at the home of her daughter, Caitlin Margaret May, who announced the death.

Ms. Hickey ran the bridal boutique at Bendel's under the company's president, Geraldine Stutz, a celebrated figure in fashion retailing, from 1960 until she was hired by Bergdorf's in 1967 to run a division under her own name, the Bridal World of Monica Hickey .

In 1978, she returned to Bendel's, where for more than a decade she headed the venerable Shop for Brides in the company's flagship on West 57th Street in Manhattan, which had opened in 1908 and was considered an institution. In 1987, Bendel's announced the store's closure. The closure followed an acquisition by The Limited two years earlier, which also led to a move to Fifth Avenue.

“Over the years, Bendel's bride has remained steadfast in one concept,” Ms. Hickey said in an interview with The New York Times after the announcement. “Her dress had to be romantic, delicate, tasteful, streamlined and never hectic.”

Among the prominent brides Mrs. Hickey served there were the television host Jane Pauley and three daughters of the auto magnate William Clay Ford.

Over the years, she helped dress a number of other notable brides, including Amanda M. Burden, a daughter of magazine editor and socialite Babe Paley, who would later serve on New York City's planning commission under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg . ; and Margaret Lindsay, a daughter of another New York mayor, John V. Lindsay; Phyllis George, the former Miss America and CBS football host who married John Y. Brown Jr., the Kentucky Fried Chicken magnate who was elected governor of Kentucky in 1979.

She also helped outfit Vera Wang, who became a celebrated bridal designer herself but was then design director for Ralph Lauren's women's accessories and homewear, for her 1989 wedding to stockbroker Arthur Becker.

After Ms. Wang opened her own bridal boutique on Madison Avenue in 1990, she asked Ms. Hickey to run it. Mrs. Hickey ultimately declined the offer, although they remained friends.

“She sent out a contract three years,” Ms. Hickey recalled on the “Meet the Masters” podcast in 2007. She thought it was a “great opportunity,” she said, but when she told her husband, Peter Glushanok, a filmmaker and composer, his response was: 'Just do that. do you want to be a bird in a gilded cage?

Mrs. Hickey was born in Glasgow on November 17, 1923, the youngest of three children of Irish parents, Margaret (Ryan) Hickey, a seamstress, and Patrick Hickey, a typesetter.

Her family moved frequently between cities in Scotland, northern England and Ireland during her childhood. When she was 14, they settled in London, where she left school to help her mother with her home tailoring business.

Monica first became entranced by the world of luxury, her daughter said, during the Second World War, when she was evacuated from London during the Blitz to the safety of an aristocratic hunting lodge in the countryside.

In 1953, she and her sister, Kathleen, moved to New York to escape the hardships of war-torn England. She eventually found a job as an assistant buyer in the evening wear department at Bendel's. At one point, Mrs. Stutz asked her to temporarily fill in in the bridal department, telling her that “our buyer, who we brought in from Philadelphia, I'm afraid she's drinking before she gets here,” Mrs. Stutz. Hickey said on the podcast.

After a few months, Ms. Stutz approached her again and apologized that she had not yet found a replacement. “And I said, 'But you did,'” Ms. Hickey recalled.

While running her boutiques, Ms. Hickey traveled regularly to Europe as a buyer – and, in effect, a tastemaker – in search of dresses by designers such as Karl Lagerfeld, Ursula of Switzerland and the well-known British designers David and Elizabeth Emanuel, who brought Ms. Hickey to the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer to see the wedding up close explosion of ivory silk taffeta they had prepared themselves for the new princess.

At 6 feet tall, Mrs. Hickey rarely bothered to carry boxes or hoist elaborate dresses, her daughter said; instead, she relied on her keen eye, honed by the hand of her seamstress mother, to advise brides on the perfect fit and draping.

She also served as a de facto diplomat, managing the egos of many of her society clients and their mothers. After her last run at Bendel's, she ran Saks' bridal salon for more than a decade and briefly consulted for Vera Wang and Kleinfeld Bridal. She retired in 2003.

In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Hickey is survived by four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Her husband, Mr. Glushanok, died in 1996.

Despite her success, Ms. Hickey faced her share of challenges — particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when couples following a flower child impulse forsook grand weddings to marry on sun-drenched beaches or in rural meadows.

'The girls really didn't want that wedding dresses not at all,” she recalled in a 1997 interview with The Tampa Bay Times. “But most of them succumbed because Grandmother cut them out of the will if they didn't.”