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When Bonni Keller opened an Andre Courreges boutique on East 57th Street off Madison Avenue 13 years ago, one could almost count the designer shops on Madison on one's thumbs. Those days, few saw the Yves Saint Laurent and Halston boutiques for what they were: harbingers of the street's future.
Today, Halston is gone, but Madison Avenue has become Designers' Mile, with the blocks between 57th and 72nd streets a veritable who's who of the world fashion milieu. Indeed, some designers, including Hubert de Givenchy, Kansai Yamamoto and Hanae Mori, have even begun testing Madison's "frontier," otherwise known as the stretch north of 72nd Street. Explains Diane Levbarg, "We're running out of space."
Mrs. Keller and Miss Levbarg are the doyennes of Madison Avenue. They've contributed in no small way to its growth as a designer mecca. Between them, they own or have begun eight Madison Avenue boutiques, totaling close to 21,000 square feet -- almost the size of half a floor at Bloomingdale's.
Mrs. Keller owns four Madison Avenue boutiques and is negotiating for a fifth. She also owns a Trump Tower boutique and some 10 other shops in four cities across the country and plans to open one on Long Island this summer.
Miss Levbarg, a former Bloomingdale's executive turned consultant, has made a business in the last 3 1/2 years of setting up European designers' boutiques.
Though the two women barely know each other, they share many attributes. The New York natives are hard-working types who love what they do as much as they shun the spotlight. Both also boast what one Saks Fifth Avenue executive calls "that rare and magic combination" of intuitive fashion sense and keen business acumen. Both even own homes in Palm Beach, Fla.
Miss Levbarg and Mrs. Keller are said by colleagues to be perfectionists who have little tolerance for sloppiness or errors. Mrs. Keller expresses surprise at this but acknowledges that "I fight very hard for what I believe in."
The word 'impossible,' she adds, "is not in my vocabulary."
Levbarg: Designers' Eyes and Ears
It was as the first American in Harrod's executive training program more than a decade ago that Diane Levbarg first stood on the other side of the check-out counter. It...