The New York Stock Exchange : At Manhattan’s Sample Sales, It’s Every Woman for Herself as Bargain Hunters Grab Designer Castoffs at 50% (and More) Off

There is lust in the air, unadulterated longing among shoals of women parading 7th Avenue, past loading docks and up service elevators, searching for bargains at Manhattan’s version of the souk: sample and stock sales.

On the first Monday morning in June--high season for these sales--50 women are stripped down to their bras and pantyhose in a dusty warehouse on 38th Street, pulling on slim trousers, polyester blazers and linen vests. They had waited in line in a warm drizzle to be first at the racks while there was still a semblance of order.

“I can’t take this,” groans Jeri Schecter, a 50ish woman with sunglasses pushed back in her thick blond hair. “I want to go to work.”

She is stressed as only a woman can be when confronted with too many choices, competition for clothes, inadequate mirrors and a chance for 50% off.

While Schecter tries on clothes at this Philippe Adec sale, she also keeps an eye on her pocketbook at her feet and her own clothes, folded neatly over an exposed radiator. At a sale last season, Schecter’s own pants were put on the rack, and it took hours to find them.

Indeed, all pretenses of retail shopping disappear.

Instead of a carpeted dressing room, there is an open area with a scattering of mirrors. Instead of wood and glass display cases, there are metal racks arranged by sizes. And instead of a young salesclerk named Sean or Luke commenting, “That looks faaaaabulous on you,” even though you look like the side of a barn, there are blunt assessments from other shoppers: Too tight. Too small. There’s a stain. Bad color. Can I try that on?

Schecter relies on her friends for help.

“There are 25 jackets in this color. Which one looks good on me?” she asks them.

Real estate agents in the same firm, Schecter and her friends Maxine Adler and Sue Canold shop these sales so regularly together they know each other’s sizes and figure flaws--perhaps better than their own husbands do.

Adler and Canold examine Schecter in the red pantsuit. The Size 6 pants are a perfect fit, but the jackets are a problem. The loose style is maybe too loose, and the double-breasted style hugs maybe a little too tightly.

In desperation, Schecter turns for advice to Austria Rodriguez, a sales manager for North and South America for Philippe Adec who works as a salesclerk at these twice-yearly sales.

“Double-breasted is not your thing,” Rodriguez candidly admits. She offers to root around for yet another style.

Schecter and her friends flee after two hours with each having spent about $400--cash only. The savings are significant. The double-breasted blazer they bought for $125 costs $239 at Bergdorf Goodman’s 20 blocks north. The $70 silk blouse by Equipment they took home in a paper shopping bag costs $170 on Madison Avenue, where the wrapping is delicate tissue paper.

This is the secret world of 7th Avenue sample and stock sales--as intoxicating and whirlwind as a romantic affair, only more tedious. And rather than two conspirators, there are three.

There is the shopper--a select New York woman so consumed by style she forages the sales to satisfy and afford her need for color, proportion and designer labels.

There is the manufacturer, eager to dump leftover goods at the end of a season.

And there is the complaisant retailer, who hates the whole business, but what is he to do? Rumor has it that a few years ago a retailer ratted on a well-known designer for not charging taxes at his sample sales. While sources throughout the fashion world mention the incident, none provide details. For above all, the conspirators demand discretion. Even though vendors advertise sales in trade magazines and scores of women find out about them from flyers handed out on 7th Avenue, the affair is to remain an open secret.

“I don’t want to upset my retailers in New York City because it’s such a great market,” says one vendor who asks for anonymity. “It’s instant cash. There are no returns, no exchanges and no checks. And it keeps my label out of the outlets. That way I preserve my name.”

Freda Soiffer, who conducts sales for popular designers, still considers them a private matter.

“I’m not into hurting anybody,” she says, refusing to reveal who she works for even though she informs thousands of shoppers of the sales by sending them postcards.

In the early 1980s, sample sales truly were exclusive. Vendors used them to pawn off last season’s samples, usually Size 6s and 8s, at below-wholesale prices. Often the clothes had been worn by runway and magazine models and were mauled with safety pins, sweat and tape. Only the fashion cognoscenti--designers, their employees, magazine editors--were allowed in. Occasionally, they could bring a friend.

But in the past decade, the sales have expanded into a booming cottage industry, particularly at the end of the fall/winter and spring/summer selling seasons. Over the years the term “sample sale” has become a misnomer as vendors began using them to unload not just samples but also excess stock.

“In December you could spend every waking moment going from sale to sale and you wouldn’t cover them all,” says Elysa Lazar, a former banker who now runs the S&B; Report, the bible of sale listings for about 10,000 subscribers. “We estimate there are 300 sales in December alone and 60 to 80 [in] other months.”

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At 7 a.m. the first day of Donna Karan’s sample and stock sale--among the biggest and best known on 7th Avenue--more than 60 women are lined up with their paper cups of steaming designer coffee waiting to get in.

“I’m sometimes the first on line,” gushed Karan, interviewed recently at an AIDS fund-raiser. In perusing samples--sometimes 25 or 30 jackets are made up before a final style is developed--Karan says, “You see the creative process; you see how much intention goes into the collections, what’s not used, what makes it.”

You also see a reflection of hard times in the competitive “rag trade” centered in Manhattan’s fashion district, with its 4,500 manufacturers and 60,000 workers.

If a delivery is 15 minutes late, a department store may ship it back, and a whole line ends up at a vendor’s showroom sale. If a line of skirts is cut too long or goods are damaged, they, too, may end up in the sale. And if the economy is erratic, as it has been in recent years, it is the woman willing to wade through these fire sales who can benefit. The same clothes may be reduced at retail stores, but 7th Avenue prices are often lower.

Three years ago, Liza Kraus bought a loden green overcoat with a velvet collar at a sample sale for $400; she spied it for $1,500 on 5th Avenue.

“My husband works on 7th Avenue, and I know what a bad Christmas they had that year,” Kraus says.

In addition to the vagaries of the economy and a general trend toward outlet shopping, these sales are an expression of the New York woman and her unique way of shopping and approach to style as she tries to exploit her proximity to the epicenter of the fashion and secure a bargain.

Katherine Betts, the stunning fashion news director of Vogue whose outfits seem a casual assemblage of beauty, says she is often stopped at her newsstand in the morning by women wanting to know about her shoes--who made them, where she bought them. Or, they’ll admire a sweater she is wearing and inquire about the designer.

“Women in New York really look at each other,” she says. “They’re not looking to see who looks better. They’re examining your style and how you put it together. . . . These aren’t just fashion victims. These are career women with busy lives but an interest in fashion and desire to own what they see.”

And sample and stock sales allow for a rare democratization in fashion.

They represent an opportunity for that career girl in sensible pumps who doesn’t want to put herself out on the limb for a $1,200 Oscar de la Renta suit to get one for $500; for the stunning dancer/exercise teacher who gets a slightly worn sample of an Isaac Mizrahi taffeta ball gown for $150; for the secretary from Staten Island to buy a smashing bikini for $18.

“Most of the time sample-sale shopping for me is bottom fishing--$10 black shoes or a $15 blouse,” says Mary Lynn, a shoe-store clerk who spends her lunch hours poking around 7th Avenue sales. “But every so often I break out spend $400 or $500. Makes me feel great.”

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“This takes discipline,” Bella Long explains coolly. “You can’t just grab. You have to think, ‘Do I need it? Is it really me? Am I impressed with the label or the outfit?’ ”

It is late May, and she is waiting to get into a sale in the basement of an office building. The sale offers a hodgepodge of labels, including extra-large women’s sizes. It is mostly cheap clothes, but Long is determined to find something for her summer wardrobe and has pre-shopped in Bloomingdale’s to know what’s trendy.

Long, 26, moved here for a job in computers three years ago after graduate school in St. Louis. Before she came east, her style was “khakis and Keds,” but she admits that once she got here she became aspirational.

“Everyone looks so good that it affects you,” she says. “Everyone talks labels and where they shop, and it affects you.”

Once she heard about sample and stock sales, she got on a few lists, such as for Michael Kors and Anna Sui, and started searching for a great black jacket--an essential of the New York woman’s uniform.

She found herself an Anne Klein.

“Not Anne Klein II,” she says, peering at a reporter’s notebook to make sure it’s understood she’s talking the more expensive line.

Yet as proud as she is of her successes at these sales, she insists that what they mostly are is educational: “They’re an instant seminar on how to dress. You see more women, what they’re wearing, how they put it together.”

Most women have a story of one fabulous buy that was pure serendipity and that keeps them coming back for more.

For Schecter, the real estate agent, it was a red Escada cashmere blazer; for Long, it was that Anne Klein blazer; for Lynn, it was a Jenny B blouse.

Maize Bendar, on the other hand, would never reduce her experience to one acquisition.

Tall, thin and in her late 40s, Bendar doesn’t need to drag herself down to 7th Avenue for these little feeding frenzies. She doesn’t need to shop in a neighborhood of storefronts selling trim and lace, alongside errand boys pulling racks of clothes down Broadway. She doesn’t need to be slipping off her Ferragamos in a showroom with “the shop girls” and “the women from the Five Towns”--a middle-class slice of western Long Island.

“My husband works on Wall Street,” Bendar says. In other words, she has money.

But Bendar, an avid reader of Women’s Wear Daily, enjoys an insider’s glimpse of the fashion world that these sales sometimes uncover. This spring while she went to lunch wearing knit suits in an array of sorbet colors that she bought, of all places, in a retail store, on weekends she chanced an edgier trend, wearing a multicolored long wrap skirt --”It’s very Gauguin in Tahiti”--that she bought at a sample sale.

If there is anything she doesn’t like about these sales, it is the behavior of the rich women. She recalls an excursion a few years ago to a rare Giorgio Armani sale: “When the doors opened, I saw the daughter of a big real estate guy I know run to the Size 10s, throw her arms around them and scream, ‘They’re mine!’ ”

Bendar’s manner is more collected, and her desire is for adventure.

“If I find something, well, great,” she says. “If not, I’ve had an interesting day.”

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Patti Rose has seen all varieties of behavior--the primal, peculiar and polite. She runs small sample sales up and down 7th Avenue each season.

She started by helping De la Renta get rid of 15 racks of clothes he had been storing in his stockroom “from the year of the flood.”

“I was known because I can sell a motorcycle with three wheels,” says Rose, who wears her hair short and slicked back, and, despite her 4-foot, 11-inch frame, owns a highly polished wardrobe.

On the first day of that first De la Renta sale a few years ago, Rose sold eight of the 15 racks and brought in $50,000.

“How could anyone not like that?” Rose says. “Cash and carry!”

For the De la Renta sales, she contacts a select group of women, buzzing them into the designer’s cream-colored showroom, where there are $5,000 beaded dresses marked down to $1,500.

“Oscar would never advertise,” Rose says.

For Jeannine Bohrer, who has a bridge line filled with colorful daytime dresses, Rose takes out a $300 ad in the S&B; Report and draws a broader audience.

“If I sell just three dresses, the ad pays for itself and the rest is profit,” Rose says. She notifies customers through the mail from her lists.

“I have at least 2,000 ladies on my lists,” she says.

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Whether it’s groups of modest Hasidic women pulling new clothes over their street clothes or hip, half-naked women trying on bathing suits, these sales most often become girlfriend outings: mothers and daughters or co-workers escaping their workaday worlds into the bowels of 7th Avenue.

In Elena Dorino’s office, eight women share a $49 subscription to the S&B; Report and keep each other posted on word-of-mouth sales.

“We share the tricks and the tips,” says Dorino as she adds up the tags on outfits she’d like to buy and begins weeding out what she absolutely doesn’t need.

“I can’t spend $840!” she says.

“Don’t take the shorts,” office mate Robin Miller says. “I worry about them riding up on you.”

Another woman, a perfect stranger, hears Dorino and Miller chatting about a TSE cashmere sale and inquires about prices.

“I haven’t gone yet, even though I hear they have twin sweater sets,” says Miller, adding: “I can’t think about cashmere this time of year.”

Dorino looks at her watch.

“Robin, it’s five of 11,” she says. “I have to go. I have an 11 o’clock with my new boss.”

“Who cares?” says Miller, examining herself in a sleek black French-cut suit. “How can you leave me? I’m falling in love!”