ML - Michigan Avenue

2012 - Issue 5 - September

Michigan Avenue - Niche Media - Michigan Avenue magazine is a luxury lifestyle magazine centered around Chicago’s finest people, events, fashion, health & beauty, fine dining & more!

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missed that coronation!" Yet W it Pheromone was the first of 36 fragrances that Miglin created. is clear tycoon understands hen hearing that she could be called the "Empress of Oak Street," Marilyn Miglin chuck- les softly. "Somehow, I think I the cosmetics and fragrance the accolade—and knows that she richly deserves it. Thanks to her zeal to make Oak Street great, Miglin is universally rec- ognized as a dynamo who took a street of small Gold Coast businesses and turned it into an inter- national retailing mecca. Miglin launched her eponymous firm on Oak Street in June 1963, but this former top Chicago model—who earlier had been a "Chez Paree Adorable" dancer at nightclub—has spent most of her the popular North Side life closely observing the evolution of that special street and the city's overall retailing scene. During recent chats with Michigan Avenue at her Gold Coast home in her Oak Street salon (about to be relaunched this month), and in a stroll down the iconic shopping destination, Miglin reflects on "what was then… and what we have now proudly become." In the late 1940s, Oak Street slowly moved from being a quiet residential avenue of stately town- houses into a more commercial area—but one still Marilyn Miglin's Oak Street store, circa 1965 catering to what once was called "the carriage trade." "It's an archaic term now, but that's what we called it," says Miglin. "Our ladies would put on their hats and gloves, and would walk and shop along Oak Street. The boutiques and businesses were all locally owned and operated. For a long while, Oak Street was a street of hair salons and a smattering of smart, small boutiques, but we also had a Jewel [grocery store] and a butcher shop and the Acorn on Oak (an iconic restaurant of yester- year), which was always so dark inside you never knew whether it was day or night once you entered. And, of course, there was the Esquire Theatre, which was the place to go to the movies." It was at the Esquire where the young Marilyn Klecka went on her first date with a rising young real estate executive named Lee Miglin. "We sat in the balcony," the long-legged ex-model recalls. "My knees were practically in my chin for the whole movie!" Miglin tragically lost her husband in 1997, when he was killed by Andrew Cunanan, who also took the life of designer Gianni Versace. His widow says quietly, "I think of him every single day." Miglin remembers an early upscale women's apparel operations run by the long-gone Ethel Doll from the 1940s and '50s. "It was a complete coutu- rier business. She did hats, gowns, furs in the basement, and dressing rooms upstairs." After the shop closed, the building remained vacant, until Miglin and her late husband took on two mortgages to buy it. "I just fell in love with all the arches and the overall architecture of the place," says Miglin. But the customer base on Oak Street has changed dramatically from those simpler times of the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s. "The biggest change came in the '80s, when all of a sudden all the women went to work," says Miglin. "Instead of being ladies who could shop all day, it was either early in the morning, at lunchtime, after work, or on weekends. Oak Street had to evolve to meet the needs of the working professional woman." In response, Miglin and a group of like-minded entre- preneurs decided in the 1980s to tell Chicago—and ultimately the world—"just what we had to offer on Oak Street." It certainly was a challenge. "We weren't organized. There was no unity and we made no statement to the shopping public. Bloomingdale's was coming along and, frankly, I thought we all were going to be swallowed by that big retail giant," says Miglin, referring to the September 1988 opening of the New York–based high-end department store just a block away from Oak Street at 900 North Michigan Avenue. So Miglin, joined by "a goodly number of people on the street, like Marlene Rubenstein and Terri ABOVE: A newspaper article detailing the revamping of Oak Street by Miglin and friends in the '80s. LEFT: Marilyn Miglin struts her stuff as a model in the late '60s. D'Ancona, who owned [former women's boutique] Terri D., decided we had to have an organization to market the street." And that's how the Oak Street 124 MICHIGANAVEMAG.COM

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