A Washington menswear shop, Herald Square and a merger with Gimbels.

The name Saks Fifth Avenue combines a family name and an address, and the family name is the older half. English Wikipedia says the brothers Andrew and Isadore Saks set up a men’s clothing store, A. Saks & Co., in 1867 in a storefront on Seventh Street in Washington, D.C. Wikipedia says the shop sold its goods at one price and accepted returns, and that the Washington Evening Star later described its newspaper advertising as forceful but strictly truthful. By 1896 the company had stores in Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia, in New York and in Indianapolis, as well as in Washington.

The New York chapter began in 1902, when Saks opened a store at 34th Street and Broadway on Herald Square. Andrew Saks ran it as a family business with his brother and his sons Horace and William, and Wikipedia says Horace took over management in 1912. In 1923 Saks & Co. merged with Gimbel Brothers, owned by Bernard Gimbel, a cousin of Horace Saks, and the Saks business ran as a separate subsidiary.

The address entered the name the next year. In September 1924 the partners opened a new store on Fifth Avenue, in a building designed by the architects Starrett & van Vleck. Wikipedia describes the site as a full block of avenue frontage just south of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, facing the land that would become Rockefeller Center. The Herald Square building was spun off and became Saks-34th Street under Gimbels, while the Fifth Avenue store carried the Saks name forward with its street attached.

Adam Gimbel became president of Saks Fifth Avenue in 1926, and under him the name travelled. Wikipedia lists seasonal resort branches in Palm Beach in 1926, Atlantic City in 1927 and Miami Beach in 1929, a year-round store in Chicago in 1929, and stores in Beverly Hills and Detroit by 1940. After the Second World War the company turned wartime shops in New Haven and Princeton into University Shops serving the nearby campuses. Each new branch kept the full name, so that “Fifth Avenue” came to stand for a style of store as much as for a street in Manhattan.

Gimbels, BATUS, Investcorp, Hudson’s Bay and Saks Global.

The ownership of Saks Fifth Avenue has changed many times since Gimbels. Wikipedia says the tobacco company Brown & Williamson acquired the Gimbels chain, Saks included, in 1973, and that the business passed to its sister company BATUS in 1980. In 1990 Saks was sold to the investment firm Investcorp, and the same year the company opened its Saks Off 5th clearance store. In 1998 Proffitt’s, Inc. acquired the parent, Saks Holdings, and renamed itself Saks, Inc.

In 2013 the Canadian retailer Hudson’s Bay Company acquired Saks, Inc., according to Wikipedia, bringing Saks under the same owner as Lord & Taylor. HBC later placed Saks Fifth Avenue and Saks Off 5th in a new company, Saks Global, and in December 2024 Saks Global completed its purchase of Neiman Marcus Group. FashionUnited, reporting the completion on 23 December 2024, wrote that the group now included Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue and Saks OFF 5TH, each continuing to trade under its own name. The Associated Press reported on 14 January 2026 that Saks Global had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the Southern District of Texas, and in June 2026 that the company had left Chapter 11 under a new name, Exemplar Luxury Group. Exemplar Luxury Group, formerly Saks Global, has owned Saks Fifth Avenue since 2024.

The identity went through its own changes over these years. In April 2007 Time magazine, in its Style & Design issue, reported on the store’s new shopping bag, designed by Michael Bierut of the design firm Pentagram with Terron Schaefer, Saks’s senior vice president for creative and marketing. Time wrote that the pair started from the idea that the logo should be a square, kept the store’s cursive lettering, which had last been redrawn in the 1970s, and pared back some of its flourishes. Bierut, Time said, then cut the script into 64 squares and reassembled them at random, producing a graphic that could be rearranged almost without end.

Time also reported that the pattern had already moved beyond bags into a collaboration with Ellen Tracy on a blouse, scarf and skirt. Pentagram’s own project page says the brief covered signage, advertising, direct mail, the website and packaging, and that the program ran to more than forty packages, from jewellery boxes to hat boxes, and four sizes of shopping bag.

Design and documentation.

A department store is one of the few retail formats where the building itself carries the brand. Many flagships occupy purpose-built premises on major city streets, and their facades, corner towers, clocks and glass domes are designed to be recognised from a distance and photographed from the pavement. Inside, atriums, galleries and grand staircases give the name a physical setting that a logo alone cannot supply, and the building often appears in advertising, on postcards and on the store’s own merchandise.

The shopping bag is the identity that leaves the building. A strong bag uses a single colour, a wordmark or a simple pattern that reads clearly at street level, and stores tend to keep the same scheme for years so that the bag becomes a familiar sight in other parts of the city. Gift boxes, tissue and ribbon usually follow the same palette.

Window displays add a seasonal layer. Many department stores dress their street windows to a theme each season, and the year-end windows are often unveiled at a public event that draws crowds. Spring fashion launches, sale periods, illuminated facades and in-store decorations follow a yearly calendar, so the identity changes on a schedule while the name and the building stay the same.

A name, an address and a script in squares.

The Saks Fifth Avenue identity starts with its name, which joins a family surname to the street the store moved to in 1924. The pairing has stayed in place through Gimbels, Brown & Williamson, Investcorp, Saks, Inc., Hudson’s Bay, Saks Global and Exemplar Luxury Group, and each new branch took the address with it.

The second element is the cursive script. Pentagram says on its project page that, in researching the store’s history, the designers found cursive writing to be the one recurring theme, sometimes casual and sometimes Spencerian. It identifies the 1973 logo as the work of Tom Carnese, adapted from a signature introduced about twenty years earlier, and says the 2007 version was redrawn from it with the type designer Joe Finocchiaro and set in a black square. Pentagram adds that the logo before 2007 had been in use since the mid-1990s, as part of a grey packaging program.

The third element is the grid. The black square is divided into 64 smaller squares, and the tiles can be shuffled and rotated, Pentagram says, into a very large number of variations. Time, writing in 2007, quoted Bierut as saying the aim was to signal continuous change while keeping the familiarity of well-known packaging. Many of the tiles stand on their own as abstract shapes, so a bag, a box or a sign can carry a fragment of the script without spelling out the name.

The fourth element is black and white. Pentagram says the program is deployed in black and white, in line with the store’s holiday “snowflake” packaging, and that it produces consistency without sameness: across more than forty packages and four bag sizes, no two designs are alike, yet they belong together.

For a design guide, Saks Fifth Avenue shows how a single script logo can be broken into parts and still read as one name. Compare it with Neiman Marcus, its sister store in the same group, and with Bloomingdale’s, another New York store whose bags carry its identity. For this guide we use black, grey and white with a script, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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