The mythical Miss

A misspent lament for Miss Jackson’s

Miss Jackson’s is a teentsy Tiffany’s. Walking through the doors—the day after the store announced it’d be closing its doors for good—I felt like Paul Varjak, minus my Golightly and capable of spending only a limited amount. Perhaps a pound jar of the Lindsay Farms muscadine jelly.

But I wasn’t looking to buy, just to look, and I wasn’t alone. A clerk in giftwrap stood idle over a large table, with a nearby closet stacked with green, purple and grey gift boxes. Out in the showroom, clerks outnumbered customers by a safe margin.

“If you have a question, just holler, sir,” one of them said to me. I did: Where did everybody go?

“Shop” dates to 1300, possibly from the Old English scoppa, a “booth or shed for trade or work,” likely related to scypen, meaning “cowshed.”

I don’t miss shopping, but I strangely miss shops. The little emporiums, indie record bins, corner bookstores, oddball thrifts, and the misfits who run them. Remember Swinney’s Hardware, in Whittier? Home Depot, by design, gives me a headache.

You don’t shop in a big box. You bag and tag.

I go “shopping” at Macy’s every day, whether I like it or not. Because I bought a suit online five years ago—a black, wool DKNY that cost less than my weekly trip to Sprouts—my web browsing is littered with their little white men in little black suits.

I navigate away from those pages, and hope that Macy’s doesn’t inadvertently hand my credit card over to Russians.

Miss Jackson’s, 1974 Utica Square, announced its closing the week of Halloween, fulfilling a prophecy it denied even this summer. When Steve’s Sundry closed two years ago, I never even dropped in to say goodbye. 

“When was the last time you were in?” Judy White, Miss Jackson’s GM asked me. I couldn’t remember, but she’d missed the target.

White talks of the “perception” problem Miss Jackson’s has been saddled with over the years, that everything in the store is priced through the roof. There was a time, when retail was fought in the cold trenches of class warfare, that price had a cachet. Now, it’s a war we wage with drones.

“We’ve changed considerably with the times,” said White, who’s been with the store 14 years. “It’s a process. You continue to reevaluate your business.”

Forty-one “associates” will be reevaluating, too, come January. Back in the day, Miss Jackson’s on a resume likely carried some heft. But, with what White calls the “culture of dress up” fading year by year, how long before the doors close on the last boutique ever?

“I don’t think it’ll happen,” she said. “But I do think it’s always going to be a struggle to provide the type of service and expertise that we do.”

Service and expertise … both relics of a bygone era, like the Nutcracker vignettes that animate the Square each Christmas, or the red London phone booths, their handsets tethered to a foot of coil.

So who was this mythical Miss? She was a transplant and a corsetière¹. She came to town from gloomy Pittsburgh—where “the sky was dark with coal smoke and the sun was hidden from view”—and went to work for the Beane-Vandever Dry Goods Company for two years before going out on her own.

The mission, as outlined in the brief history, The Story of Nelle Shields Jackson by Kate Meyers: “The shop exists to serve its patrons, and they should be made as comfortable in the shop as they would be in their own homes.”

Jackson’s own home in Riverview sits too far in to offer any glimpse of the Arkansas. Maybe from an upstairs window.

“Even by 1920s standards,” Meyers wrote, “the house, located at 1403 South Guthrie, was not by any means ostentatious.”

It was a saffron-yellow, New England clapboard two-story that featured a curved staircase with handrails upholstered in apricot velvet, Meyers wrote. “The long living room was carpeted by a huge gold rug, specially woven in Scotland, and was papered in emerald green grasscloth.” Gold brocade draperies, Louis XV armchairs, wallpaper “in the Bird and Flower pattern” from Alsace-Lorraine rounded out the elegant understatement.

After a half-century run, Miss Jackson sold her shop in 1962 to A. Ray Smith, owner of the Tulsa Oilers baseball club, who sold it two years later to the Vandever brothers (their big “V” adorned my fifth-grade baseball jersey), who moved it to its Utica address. Bill Fisher bought it in 1967, a year after Jackson died at 93.

Forever a miss, she never married.

Miss Jackson’s is part museum, for the exhibitionist in all (or some) of us, and part mausoleum, where sleeping beauty has been laid to rest: the delicate pattern of acorn, oak and laurel on the Bernardaud porcelain; the William Yeoward decanters with Gin, Bourbon, Scotch and Vodka etched in frost; the lacquered handmade trays of Annie Modica; the Match pewter hand hammered into chargers and bowls; the Lulu Frost and Julie Vos rings, necklaces, bracelets and other charms.

Afraid to touch anything, I took the elevator to the second floor, where the bridal registry gives way to the dressing room. A slender woman who could have been Italian or Incan stood up from a desk and asked me gently, “Just looking? OK.”

With its Greco-Roman touches, it reminded me of Caesar’s Palace, which only embellished the decadence. It’s the last place I’d expect to hear Sam & Dave, but there they were, belting a soulful rendition of “I Thank You”:

Every day was something new

You pull out your bag and your fine to-do

You got me trying new things too

Even out of my league, I was taken by a rack of Frascara gowns—pretty maids, all in a row—arrayed with ample room between each, like the houses in Ranch Acres. Underfoot, bamboo floorboards that bore the black scuffs of the well heeled.

Near the elevator hangs a portrait of Nelle herself: a Warholian triptych nailed over a display of Commando “dig-free” legwear.

A sign near the Fur Salon reads, “Is your fur outdated?”

For a culture happily resigned to eating in the car, it all feels a bit idyllic, even delusional. All the place settings and gowns and fragrances seem more at home in the pages of a Wharton novel than the dining rooms of Terwilleger Boulevard.

Still, I want to box it in Nalgene and freeze it in time. A keepsake, like the Lalique vase in the window case whose crystal softly shimmers, suspended against a black veil as if by magic. In the window, the vinyl signage, equally radiant, advertises the 50^th, and final, season for Miss Jackson’s.

“Ageless,” it goes.

1) French for corsetmaker. Also called a staymaker. Corsetières combined a knowledge of anatomy with a fashion sensibility to provide their clients with the classic wasp-waisted, hourglass look that many 19th century women (and men) failed to come by naturally. The best corsetières were power players, with posh clients and multiple patents. In a mode of skinny jeans, corsets are more likely to appear in boudoir photography and online BDSM websites.

For more from Mark, read his beginner's guide to boxed wine.