Cook In Style
Saks Fifth Avenue's Fashion Designer Cookbook
For the 1989 Christmas season, Saks Fifth Avenue launched an ambitious project that had taken months to pull together—an agenda-cum-cookbook for the coming year, featuring recipes from fifty-five fashion designers. Organized and edited by Helen O’Hagan, Saks’ vice-president and corporate director of public relations, the recipes come from designers renowned and little-known, European and American, male and female, high fashion and sportswear, and even one fashion-adjacent person (the beauty legend Estée Lauder)—a cross-section of what you would have found for sale in Saks’ many departments in 1990.
Cook In Style begins with an introduction by O’Hagan, who celebrated 30 years at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1985, celebrating the opening of the company’s 46th branch (at the Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis, which closed in 2004) and presenting a quick overview of the history of how the department stores Saks & Co. and Gimbel Brothers, Inc. came together to become Saks Fifth Avenue. Tying together Saks’ past and future, O’Hagan writes, “Throughout its distinguished history, Saks has been lauded for its luxury items of high-quality fashion apparel, for its spacious aisles and leisurely ambiance, and for its elaborate shopping services… But throughout this period of growth, the attention to quality and service which first created its reputation has endured. Wherever there is a Saks Fifth Avenue, it follows in the footsteps of the original store—what the store was when it opened and what it is today.”
The agenda/cookbook is dedicated to Sophie Gimbel, wife of Saks Fifth Avenue president Adam Gimbel who designed the “Sophie of Saks” label for its Salon Moderne and was the first American fashion designer to be featured on the cover of TIME, who passed away in 1981. Primarily produced as a gift for the company’s top vendors and shoppers, it was also available for sale in Saks’ ninth-floor stationary department for $17.50 ($44.43 today).
The breakdown for the cookbook: 28 men, 26 women, and one couple (Tom and Linda Platt). Below are ten recipes, split evenly between male and female designers, showcasing elaborate meals (like Hubert de Givenchy’s Cauliflower Crown with Curry Sauce) and more casual ones (Marc Jacobs’ “Cool Burger”).
In 1983, O’Hagan produced the first version of Cook In Style, a small book featuring a different selection of recipes—some of the designers overlap, while many others differ. Let me know if I should also share some recipes from that one.
Astounded how much butter, cream, carbs in these fashion recipes!!! Would be so interesting to compare and contrast a similar kind of fashion-designer cookbook today.