Business tycoon Martha Phillips brought luxury fashion to Palm Beach
The nation’s rich who flocked in winters to Palm Beach at the turn of the 20th century might beg to differ were they alive today, but even though the island was emerging then as a resort town, it was hardly a well-known fashion mecca.
Don’t misunderstand: The wives of American financiers and industrialists looked a-la-mode chic while here in their required neck-to-toe beach frocks, ornately feathered hats or elaborate evening gowns.
But beyond the two resort hotels Standard Oil partner, railroad magnate and developer Henry Flagler had built in the 1890s just south of today’s Royal Poinciana Way, Palm Beach was still largely undeveloped with dense foliage, swamp, alligators and critters.
Famed fashion-hub Paris it was not.
But world wars began to change that, opening the door to visionaries — one in particular — who would help secure Palm Beach’s place in the fashion world.
“During World War I, wealthy Americans couldn’t go to Europe (where war raged) for fashion,” local historian Rick Rose, who conducts popular tours of Worth Avenue, told the Daily News.
“At the same time, European designers by necessity looked to America for their careers — New York first, then also Palm Beach, where wives and daughters of presidents and industrialists wintered.”
No wonder that during the 1916-1917 winter season in Palm Beach, a now-long-gone fashion shopping complex, the Fashion Beaux-Arts, opened just north of Flagler’s hotels, with entrepreneur-owner Stanley C. Warrick claiming the island was a “winter fashion capital.”
That was an exaggeration, but Palm Beach was on its way, especially after a 1920s real-estate boom saw new mansions, subdivisions and commercial districts, including Worth Avenue with the exclusive Everglades Club at its west end.
World War II crimped momentum, but its end signaled a re-ascendance of fashion as a focus — and a return to feminine glamor; Palm Beach would add its own spin with whimsy and color.
Now enter a game-changer.
She was known by a mononym: as Martha.
Her Worth Avenue salon, which debuted in the 1940s, was for decades a fashion epicenter with fashion shows starring everyone from Halston to Valentino; clients spent big money because Martha made you look and feel like a million bucks.
“I modeled at her Worth Avenue boutique in fashion shows in the 1980s and she was still going strong then,” former Palm Beach model Judy Van Vorhees said.
“Designers like Pauline Trigère and George Stavropoulos were there for their shows and seemed to adore her,” Van Voorhees said. “She knew fashion, she knew her customers and she knew business.”
And Martha, a shrewd businesswoman, broke new ground: “One thing cannot be overstated,” local historian Rose said, “and that is that if you were a talented fashion designer, Martha was a kingmaker because her influence was that great.”
She was “one of the greatest ladies,” President Donald Trump said in the 1990s, when Martha’s New York salons included one at Trump Tower.
Martha was Martha Phillips when she debuted her Worth Avenue salon, but she was born Martha Rollins in the late 1890s in Brooklyn.
Her father owned a clothing business specializing in riding attire.
She later married Philip R. Phillips, a ready-to-wear clothing manufacturer. She became restless: “I had to do something.”
Because she loved fashion and friends raved about her style — she was known for being meticulously groomed with perfectly coiffed hair — she opened a fashion salon in the early 1930s on the 12th floor of a Madison Avenue building.
Despite the Depression, Martha refused to sell bargain looks: high quality and expensive or bust.
In later years, she would move to other New York locations, but she’d eventually stake her claim on Park Avenue starting in the 1960s.
Early on, some of the world’s richest women — from Marjorie Merriweather Post and Brooke Astor — became her clients.
And they wintered in Palm Beach.
After Martha opened her salon at 230 Worth Ave. in 1945, such clients’ fashion needs could be met in a subtropical pampering utopia with models parading in elegant styles as saleswomen, fitters and alterations experts waited in the wings.
“She was as much a fashion expert and gifted businesswoman as she was a good friend to designers and clients alike,” Martha’s grandson Andrew Burnstine, an associate professor of Fashion, Marketing and Business at Lynn University, told the Daily News.
“It was a golden age of fashion and personalized service was paramount,” said Burnstine, who for years worked for his grandmother, eventually rising to executive vice president of Martha, Inc.
“Everything was first class, but when I first started, there were times when it might be necessary for me to deliver something quickly from the salon on my bicycle to a client’s mansion on South Ocean Boulevard,” he said.
Eagle-eye, detail-oriented Martha wasn’t the first female businesswoman to amplify fashion in Palm Beach nor would she be the last.
Early fashion maven Hattie Carnegie, skincare-and-makeup queen Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubenstein preceded Martha’s arrival here.
Others included Sara Fredericks, who had fashion salons on Worth Avenue and later at the Royal Poinciana Plaza, which opened in 1958.
And decades-long weekly ladies’ winter fashion shows at the Everglades Club began in the 1930s.
“But much of the genius of Martha was recognizing talent in fashion designers, especially if their work met the needs and wants of her Palm Beach clients,” said Rose Guererro, research director at the Historical Society of Palm Beach County.
“Some of these designers may have been just coming up in the fashion world,” Guerrero said, “but Martha helped them become household names.”
The list of designers whose careers were significantly impacted by Martha is long — from the aforementioned Halston and Valentino to James Galanos and Pauline Trigère.
Martha’s daughter Lynn Manulis joined Martha, Inc. as a key partner in the late 1950s after a theater career (she’d soon emerge as a fashion expert in her own right) and the two annually scouted fashion weeks in Paris, Milan and elsewhere, spending millions.
The two also visited the fashion ateliers of promising designers.
As designer Mary McFadden once recalled, “One day, Martha turned up and I was so surprised and thrilled, especially since I had seen her name on Park Avenue as long as I could remember. She bought my dresses and after that, she backed me to the hilt.”
By the 1980s, Martha, Inc. had shops on Park Avenue and at Trump Tower in New York, plus the Palm Beach salon and a location in Bal Harbor in Miami-Dade. They were said to have annual sales of about $40 million.
In 1995, a year before Martha died at age 98, the salon at 230 Worth Ave. closed and Manulis moved it east to Worth Avenue’s The Esplanade, where it remained until 2003. By then, Manulis was also considered a noted “doyenne” of haute couture in America. At her death in 2004, she was credited with keeping Martha’s legacy alive.
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