A New York loft, a move west and a place name in the brand.

Frederick’s of Hollywood began in 1946, when Frederick Mellinger started a lingerie business in a loft on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The Chicago Tribune, writing in February 1996, and the Los Angeles Times, in December 2006, both date the start to that loft and both say the business moved west a year later. English Wikipedia gives the same sequence: a Fifth Avenue loft in 1946 and a move to the West Coast in 1947, where the flagship store became a landmark in Hollywood.

The move gave the business its name, which pairs the founder’s given name with a district and stayed in use for the rest of the company’s life: Frederick’s of Hollywood was the name on the stores, on the catalogues and, later, on a listed company. The company’s current website still describes the range as “your faves since 1947”, counting from the year the business arrived in Los Angeles rather than from the New York loft.

For decades the brand’s public face was a single building on Hollywood Boulevard. In 1996 the Chicago Tribune described the company’s Hollywood headquarters as “a purple building with pink awnings”. Ten years later the Los Angeles Times called the same property Frederick’s “old purple, pink and gray Art Deco building”. That colour scheme, rather than any single logo, is what reporters reached for when they described the brand, and it is the source of the palette in this guide.

The building also housed a small museum. The Los Angeles Times dates the Lingerie Museum and Celebrity Lingerie Hall of Fame to 1987; Wikipedia gives 1986 or 1987. It showed garments from films and television alongside the company’s own early designs, among them a black lace bra called the Rising Star. Robert Nudelman of the preservation group Hollywood Heritage told the paper in 2006 that the museum had been “a nice, free attraction that was fun to visit” and that it had its place in the local colour of the boulevard. A Hollywood walking-tour operator quoted in the same report said the store was one of the more unusual features of the street.

The catalogue was the other half of the identity. In its 1996 anniversary piece the Chicago Tribune noted that the catalogue cover of the day showed a model in a pastel dress, and that the company had published its own chronicle of its 50 years, describing its fashions as “sometimes playful, but always in good taste”.

Bankruptcy, a new storefront, a merger and a name sold on.

The business that grew from the boulevard store eventually ran into trouble. In July 2000 Frederick’s of Hollywood filed for Chapter 11 protection, The New York Times reported, and The Hollywood Reporter later recorded that it re-emerged in 2003.

The reorganised company changed its address and its look. In 2005 the flagship moved, and the Los Angeles Times reported in December 2006 that the store had gone “three blocks west” along Hollywood Boulevard to a site by the corner of McCadden Place, closer to the busy Highland Avenue end of the street. The new shop was fitted out with crystal chandeliers and leopard rugs, and a company spokeswoman, Jennifer Cornwall, told the paper that there was no room for the museum, whose exhibits had been packed off to a warehouse in Phoenix. “It was great to have this historic value in Hollywood,” she said, “but we are also trying to update the look of the product and of the store.” Leron Gubler, president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, said he was glad the company had stayed in the neighbourhood and renovated another storefront.

Ownership changed several times in the years that followed. Wikipedia records that in 2006 the company merged with Movie Star and moved its headquarters back to New York, and that in 2008 the combined business took the name Frederick’s of Hollywood Group Inc. A PR Newswire release dated 30 May 2014 announced that the group had completed a transaction taking it private, with Harbinger Group and other investors as owners.

The store era ended in 2015. The Hollywood Reporter reported on 16 April 2015 that the company was closing all of its shops and would sell only online, and on 20 April The Wall Street Journal reported that it had filed for Chapter 11 protection. Wikipedia, citing Internet Retailer in June 2015, says Authentic Brands Group then acquired the brand and its online operations.

Authentic Brands Group has owned the Frederick’s of Hollywood name since 2015. The brand’s website, fredericks.com, carries a copyright line in the name of ABG-Frederick’s of Hollywood, LLC. Wikipedia says the online business was relaunched as FOH Online Corp., and that in 2018 that company was acquired by Naked Brand Group, citing a release dated November 2018. Today the name lives on as a web store rather than a chain of mall shops, and the Rising Star name that once hung in the museum is still used for a line of bras on the site.

Design and documentation.

The names in this group were shopping-mall apparel chains, and a mall chain’s identity was carried less by any one garment than by the shop itself. The storefront sign above an open gate, the lettering on a carrier bag, the swing tags on the clothes, the window posters and the catalogue or mailer were the places where a customer met the name, often within a few steps of a dozen competing signs on the same concourse.

That makes the questions behind each name practical ones: who opened the first store and where, which companies owned the chain over time, and what became of the name once the stores themselves closed or changed hands. A retail name can outlive its shops as a trademark, a website or a label sold through another retailer, so the brand on a sign and the company behind it are not always the same thing.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record from what a company says about itself, gives each date as its source states it, and treats the palette and type shown here as our own interpretation rather than a reproduction of any sign, bag or logo.

A place name, a painted building and a catalogue.

Frederick’s of Hollywood is an identity built more from a place than from a mark. The name ties a founder to a district, and for decades that district was represented by a single storefront on Hollywood Boulevard: a purple building with pink awnings and gray Art Deco detailing, as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times described it in 1996 and 2006.

The second carrier of the brand was print. In 1996, the Chicago Tribune noted, the catalogue cover showed a model in a pastel dress. The company’s own anniversary history, quoted in the same article, described the house style as “sometimes playful, but always in good taste”. Product names were part of the voice too: the bras on the store wall in 1996 were called Teaser, Charmer and Captivator II, and the black lace Rising Star was one of the early designs later shown in the museum.

The 2005 move shows a brand trying to update that look. The new store on Hollywood Boulevard swapped the old Deco building for crystal chandeliers and leopard rugs, and the company said openly that it wanted to update the look of the product and of the store. The museum, which had become part of the brand’s public story, did not make the move.

After 2015 the identity had to work without a building at all. Under Authentic Brands Group the name became an online brand, and the elements that survive are the ones that never depended on a street address: the full name with its place reference, the founding story, and product names such as Rising Star that connect today’s range to the company’s early decades.

For a design guide, Frederick’s of Hollywood shows how a retail brand can lean on architecture and colour more than on a logo, and how much of that identity has to be rebuilt when the stores close and only the name and the catalogue voice remain. Compare it with Wet Seal, another California mall retailer whose name passed to new owners after its shops closed, and Gadzooks. For this guide we use boulevard purple, awning pink and deco gray with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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