Long before shopping was governed by algorithms, targeted ads, and digital feeds, it had Saks Fifth Avenue. For multiple generations of luxury buyers, the name was not merely a retail destination; it was the ultimate arbiter of elegance, glamour, and impeccably good taste. "Saks is New York," designer Donatella Versace once declared while standing inside its grand Midtown Manhattan flagship during a promotional appearance. Yet, its influence extended far beyond the borders of Manhattan, as its sumptuous, meticulously curated stores across the country became cultural landmarks and destinations in their own right.
From Armani to Zegna, Saks carried rack upon rack of enticing indulgences that defined high-end consumption for decades. Shoppers could find Oscar de la Renta evening gowns alongside snakeskin Gucci loafers, Montblanc fountain pens next to Dior eaux de toilettes, precisely tailored Ralph Lauren suits, and matching Burberry trench coats scaled for both adults and children. There were Chanel 2.55 handbags, Louis Vuitton briefcases, and, under its own respected house label, beautifully crafted pearl necklaces, buttery calfskin gloves, and extra-soft cashmere pullovers and cardigans.
"Saks was the reliable destination where you knew you could find whatever you wanted," says Julia Stedman, a New York-based brand-strategy consultant who works with fashion and technology and shopped at the department store for decades. "Every luxury brand was there."
Footwear was a particular strongpoint of the retail experience, especially from covetable labels like Manolo Blahnik, Roger Vivier, Jimmy Choo, and Christian Louboutin. At the imposing Manhattan flagship—a Midtown magnet for both local residents and international tourists since it first opened its doors in 1924—the massive eighth-floor designer-shoe department earned a distinct milestone that no other retail store in the country could claim. In August 2007, the United States Postal Service granted the floor its own official zip code: 10022-SHOE.
"It was a great shoe department to begin with," Stedman recalls. "And then they expanded it… Literally, you could find anything and everything you could ever imagine and ever want. And it was always packed and bustling." In the 2008 film The Women, Annette Bening’s character offered a simpler, widely accepted verdict: "Nobody. Hates. Saks." At the time, it would have been difficult to find anyone in the fashion world to disagree.
Over the past few years, however, the company’s immense prestige has taken a severe beating. Financial mismanagement and operational problems, many of which were directly tied to the 2024 acquisition of luxury rival Neiman Marcus, culminated in Saks Global filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January with an overwhelming $3.4 billion in debt. Following a complex restructuring process, the firm announced in June that it had officially emerged from bankruptcy court oversight. Operating with a significantly reduced footprint of stores, the restructured company now goes by the name Exemplar Luxury Group. Whether Saks can ever truly recover its former stature—and regain the enduring affection of luxury shoppers—remains an open question across the retail industry.
In the wake of the corporate deal, the daily shopping experience had already deteriorated significantly. Customers increasingly found their once-beloved department store stocked with sporadic, often sparse assortments across their favorite categories and designer collections.
"People just felt that it wasn’t the same Saks that they used to shop at," says Anita Berger, a former senior salesperson at the Saks Fifth Avenue location in St. Louis, Missouri, which had maintained a fiercely loyal local clientele for more than half a century.
To be fair, traditional department stores have been under intense financial pressure for years. Modern consumers now shop online directly through brand websites, multi-brand e-commerce platforms, Amazon, and resale sites like The RealReal. Instead of spending leisurely afternoons browsing physical racks of clothing and receiving personalized advice from trusted, long-tenured salespeople, modern shoppers increasingly find their inspiration through social media algorithms and digital influencers. Furthermore, formal suits and men’s neckties no longer anchor everyday professional wardrobes as they once did, a trend that accelerated sharply in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The classic grand-department-store model—consisting of floor after cavernous floor packed dense with traditional inventory—may well be outdated for the modern era.
"What you have is literally this transition and shift in the paradigm," says Marshal Cohen, chief retail adviser at Circana, a premier market research firm that tracks consumer-buying patterns. "The model needs to adjust."
As consulting firm Bain & Company noted in an extensive 2024 report examining the precarious state of American department stores, "Many U.S. shoppers are now indifferent or averse to the format."
Even before Saks Fifth Avenue’s purchase of Neiman Marcus in December 2024, many prominent fashion houses sensed underlying trouble, as familiar merchant buyers and experienced sales personnel began turning over at an unsettling, rapid rate.
"You could kind of smell that something was going on, just because everything was getting a little difficult," says Daniel Wingate, founder and creative director of Wingate, a collection of sophisticated designer women’s apparel that was regularly sold at exclusive trunk shows across Saks Fifth Avenue locations. "The people in the stores were in and out and changing, unhappy." He adds, "Then, the rumor started that they were trying to buy Neimans."
That rumor proved entirely accurate, of course, and the acquisition helped saddle Saks Global with enough crushing debt that it ultimately fell behind on paying suppliers for product deliveries. Eventually, many fashion and beauty brands felt they had no choice left but to completely halt shipments to the retailer.
"Every one of my clients was saying, ‘God, the stores look so bad—there’s no inventory,’" explains Gary Wassner, CEO of Hilldun, a specialized financing firm that guarantees payments for roughly 180 fashion and beauty brands carried at Saks Global’s stores, including such labels as Rick Owens, Golden Goose, Ulla Johnson, Isabel Marant, and Victoria Beckham.
"The consumer was well aware walking into any Saks Fifth Avenue that the inventory was depleted," he adds. "It was quite noticeable, particularly as the days wore on."
"My floor looked so bad," Berger echoes, describing the mood inside the St. Louis branch. "Customers would come in and say, ‘Are you closing? This looks like Saks Off 5th.’ There was nothing new and exciting because they couldn’t get anything—they owed money to everybody."
"We never had a full size run of dresses," recalls Babatunde Fakuade, who worked for nearly a year as a sales associate at the Neiman Marcus location in Atlanta’s Lenox Square. "We would get size 2, 12, 8. It’s like, ‘Where are the other sizes?’ We didn’t get a delivery of full size runs of dresses for months at a time."
The St. Louis store where Berger spent nearly a decade ultimately closed its doors in May, though she had already departed the previous September.
"How they were treating us, how they were not paying, how the store looked—I just started to feel like, ‘I need to get out,’" she says.
"It made more financial sense, literally, to leave the organization without a job secured," Fakuade says. He left Neiman Marcus months prior to focus full-time on building a career as an independent retail business consultant.
The cash-flow issues that crippled the enterprise actually predated the Neiman Marcus acquisition. Saks Global was formed by combining Saks Fifth Avenue, the Neiman Marcus store network, Bergdorf Goodman, Horchow, and the discount chains Saks Off 5th and Last Call. However, Saks entered the merger already carrying substantial debt, much of it linked directly to its 2013 purchase by the Hudson’s Bay Company, a historic Canadian retailer with corporate roots dating all the way back to 1670.
Several early strategic moves raised eyebrows across the financial community. The iconic Fifth Avenue flagship building was heavily mortgaged in 2014 for approximately $1.2 billion, which required steep, recurring monthly debt-service payments. In 2016, the company acquired off-price retailer Gilt Groupe for $250 million, ostensibly to bolster the Saks Off 5th portfolio, only to sell it again just a couple of years later for an undisclosed sum widely rumored to be far lower than the purchase price. Additional corporate investments added still more mandatory financial obligations to a cash-strapped balance sheet.
"There were a lot of prior Hudson’s Bay issues—leases and bonds—that Saks, through succession, became obligated on," explains Lorenzo Marinuzzi, a partner at the law firm Morrison Foerster, which represents Saks Global’s unsecured creditors, including luxury conglomerates Chanel and LVMH.
The heavy financial baggage inherited from Hudson’s Bay did little to soothe vendors who were waiting anxiously to be paid for their merchandise. As Marinuzzi puts it, "When you’re telling your vendors that you don’t have money to pay them for goods they’ve sold or shipped or consigned or delivered to your stores, yet you’re paying off this Hudson’s Bay debt, it rubs people the wrong way."
The Hudson’s Bay Company itself ultimately filed for bankruptcy protection and eventually shuttered all of its remaining retail operations.
As Saks Global began to unravel operationally, many industry observers directed their criticism toward Richard Baker, who had served as Hudson’s Bay Company’s governor, executive chairman, and CEO, and subsequently assumed the role of executive chairman of Saks Global. Baker’s professional background is deeply rooted in real estate development, and critics argued that his overarching approach to managing historic department stores often prioritized property speculation and complex financial dealmaking over the traditional fundamentals of retail, such as cultivating relationships with designers or curating high-end apparel. Baker previously acquired Lord & Taylor in 2006 using extensive outside financing, later selling its flagship Manhattan building to WeWork in 2017 and its retail operations to Le Tote in 2019, before the physical brick-and-mortar stores were permanently closed in 2020.
This real-estate-centric philosophy was clearly reflected in Saks Global’s own corporate communications. A July 2024 press release announcing the planned merger described the newly formed entity as "a combination of world-class luxury retail and real-estate assets." When the transaction was formally finalized, Baker stated publicly that the strategic plan was "to redefine the luxury shopping experience" through, among other initiatives, "a portfolio of prime real estate."
"There’s a lot of head-scratching about the way Richard Baker handled himself and ran the company, his background—maybe it wasn’t the right background for this kind of retailer," Marinuzzi notes. "When people thought about the decisions that were being made and how the company was being operated, they didn’t really trust management, and they didn’t trust Richard Baker."
When the multi-brand transaction was first announced, Baker told The New York Times that "when selling luxury products, you need beautiful stores and salespeople customers trust." Yet, by the time Saks Global filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, many of its retail locations featured thinly stocked sales floors and demoralized, disgruntled employees.
Baker officially departed from Saks Global in January. These days, his public focus appears to have returned primarily to real estate, a fact highlighted by regular posts on his personal Instagram account, where his profile bio proudly describes him as "Behind $Billions in Real Estate." When contacted for an interview for this report, Baker provided a brief response: "No comment on Saks at this time." Representatives for the newly formed Exemplar Luxury Group also declined repeated requests to make executives available for comment.
When Saks Global formally filed for bankruptcy protection, the total sums owed to some of the world’s most powerful luxury conglomerates were staggering. According to court documents filed in January, the retailer owed more than $136 million to Chanel; roughly $60 million to Kering, the corporate parent of Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Bottega Veneta; about $30 million to Richemont, which oversees Cartier, Montblanc, and Chloé; and nearly $16 million to the Estée Lauder Companies, whose extensive portfolio includes La Mer, Jo Malone London, Le Labo, and Tom Ford.
While those financial losses are undeniably immense, global luxury giants possess substantial safety cushions, including their own standalone boutique networks, counters in rival department stores, and massive international revenue streams. For smaller, independent brands, however, delayed or entirely missing payments can prove far more crippling.
"As a small business, you have limited bandwidth," says a senior executive at a small, critically acclaimed independent beauty brand that was carried at Neiman Marcus. "Finances are not just endless."
This executive’s brand has still not received the "six figures" it is owed for inventory shipped to the retailer, despite having filed formal legal paperwork seeking to recover at least a portion of the balance. Without that vital income, the brand’s small management team was forced to halt contracts with several independent freelancers upon whom they heavily relied. One key manager subsequently left for another job. The company is now attempting to slowly rebuild its retail network and customer base through alternative partnerships.
She is one of several industry sources who agreed to speak under strict conditions of anonymity in a tight-knit luxury market where professional connections run deep. Many former Saks Global staffers approached for this story noted that they had signed binding nondisclosure agreements or were currently involved in active litigation regarding unpaid wages or severance, and thus declined to speak on the record.
The boutique beauty brand was hardly alone in making severe operational sacrifices to survive without incoming revenue.
"You have to keep going," explains an executive at another independent beauty label that remains owed more than a quarter of a million dollars by Saks Global. "So you’re looking at your people, you’re looking at your programs. You might be cutting advertising or awareness programs. You may be cutting marketing plans, launches, photo shoots, company parties. It’s going to be rolled all the way across, because for small businesses to lose money like that is very serious. It seriously affects your bottom line."
For one celebrity-adored women’s fashion brand carried extensively across Saks locations, the fallout included canceling a major runway show and forfeiting the substantial deposit paid on the event space, according to a marketing executive familiar with the situation.
A senior executive at another lauded fashion label states that missing payments severely compromised the company’s ongoing ability to pay for raw materials like fabric and buttons, manufacturing and production costs, full-time staff, and vital outside contractors such as public relations agencies and business consultants. The brand ultimately had to resort to laying off 20 percent of its workforce because of what the executive describes as "this cash vacuum."
The experience, he adds, "will probably stall our business five years in terms of its growth trajectory."
His brand is owed several hundred thousand dollars and has received just one full payment for collections spanning across 2024 and 2025, he notes. On certain invoices, the company was paid only pennies on the dollar, and the executive estimates his firm will ultimately recover only about 20 percent of its total outstanding balance.
The operational breakdown began with recurring payment delays, which quickly snowblown into a total collapse in communication. "We continuously started reaching out for payment and updates, and they went ghost mode on us," he says. "They didn’t respond to us for months."
To compound matters, his company’s inquiries and appeals for payment were frequently routed to corporate representatives located in Bengaluru, India, where Saks Global had centralized several administrative functions, including finance, human resources, merchandising, analytics, and marketing.
"It felt like people who really were not connected to who we were," he says. "I’m like, ‘Who are we talking to?’" In one email exchange, he adds, the independent brand’s name was misspelled entirely.
"You’re trying to explain to India how you work," says Wingate, the designer who previously sold his collections through Saks trunk shows. "In the end, it felt like that was a stunt to just delay your payments."
Wingate ultimately utilized a collection agency to recover a portion of the funds he was owed, but acknowledges he still maintains "six figures of open invoices that haven’t been paid."
Predictably, independent labels have experienced a far more difficult time recovering debts than household luxury names. According to a source familiar with Saks Global’s vendor payment histories, many of the world-renowned design houses carried across Saks, Neimans, and Bergdorf Goodman have successfully recovered at least half of the total amounts they were owed by the retailer.
Some prominent designer brands have reportedly been paid in full, or very close to it, according to the source, though these individual financial terms remain strictly guarded because rival brands would immediately demand comparable settlements. Furthermore, brands operating strictly under concession or consignment models have managed to recover close to their full balances.
Representatives for Chanel, Kering, LVMH, and the Estée Lauder Companies declined to respond to requests for comment regarding how much of their outstanding Saks debt they have successfully recovered.
The designers represented by financing firm Hilldun were collectively owed more than $66 million by Saks Global, though just under half of that total debt involved shipments that Hilldun had not formally guaranteed. Wassner reports that his firm has paid its client brands virtually all of the approved guaranteed debt, with only a small handful of vendor invoices remaining under active reconciliation.
Some independent brands had already weathered severe payment disruptions leading up to Neiman Marcus’s previous 2020 bankruptcy before encountering Saks Global’s more recent financial collapse.
"We gave up," says an executive who runs a tastemaker-approved unisex grooming brand that was sold inside Neimans and Saks during both eras. "They promised to pay you if you would ship to them again, but I wasn’t taking that risk." His company is currently owed more than $100,000 by the retailer.
Following its bankruptcy filing, Saks Global began a sweeping corporate restructuring. The company permanently closed 21 physical stores—including 18 Saks Fifth Avenue locations and three Neiman Marcus storefronts—such as landmark outposts in Chicago, where Saks had operated since 1929, alongside stores in Costa Mesa, Las Vegas, St. Louis, San Antonio, and McLean, Virginia. In addition, the firm shuttered more than 60 discount Saks Off 5th and Last Call locations. (The lone international Saks outpost, located in Kazakhstan, remains operational.)
As the physical stores were rapidly cleared out and remaining inventory was subjected to steep markdown liquidations, shoppers once again encountered Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus sales floors stripped of the upscale visual allure that had historically defined them. Social media platforms like TikTok were flooded with viral video clips showcasing grim, half-empty stores nearing closure that resembled apocalyptic storefronts rather than bastions of high fashion.
"Bad news travels faster than good news," notes Circana adviser Cohen. "People love to share their war stories of shopping." And thanks to modern smartphones, those negative consumer accounts now travel faster and wider than ever before.
As Saks Global restructured its operations to emerge from Chapter 11, an initial injection of $1.75 billion in new capital allowed suppliers to finally be paid and merchandise to begin flowing back into stores. In March, Exemplar Luxury Group announced that nearly 600 individual brands had officially resumed shipping products. During a recent walk through the historic Saks Fifth Avenue flagship located directly across from Rockefeller Center, the store appeared amply stocked across its various floors.
According to Exemplar executives, sales associates across Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue are recording higher overall sales figures this year compared to the same period in 2025, though the company declined to disclose specific percentage increases.
Nevertheless, rebuilding damaged trust with both discerning consumers and the broader fashion manufacturing industry remains an uphill battle.
"It’s hard to come out of that with both your brand partners and with your consumers," notes Aaron Cheris, a partner at Bain & Company and head of its global retail practice.
For consumers in particular, negative experiences regarding diminished customer service and sparse product selections "creates a bit of a doom loop that you really have to get out of," he observes.
The core challenge facing the newly formed group is straightforward, Cheris adds: "Can you convince both suppliers and customers that there’s a new day one?"
For independent designers who remain deeply skeptical of department store conglomerates, Exemplar’s ongoing struggle may ultimately become its competitors’ gain.
"Now more than ever, every brand I know wants to be in Bloomingdale’s," says one prominent industry insider. "It’s almost like Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom will become what Barneys was in the ’80s."
Meanwhile, many loyal shoppers have elected to adopt a cautious stance rather than immediately returning to their former shopping habits.
"It’s going to take a while to rebuild my trust," says Stedman, the longtime Saks customer. "Going there during that funky period, there was no stock, everything was on sale—it was madness. During that time, what made Saks special was not there anymore."
She concludes, "I’m going to take a wait-and-see approach and see what happens with them."
