Most remember Henri Bendel as the retail emporium and one of Manhattan’s ultimate destinations for fashion discovery – from of-the-moment designers to trends.

There’s less known, however, about Henri Bendel, the man who started with a hat shop in Greenwich Village in 1896 before going on to redefine New York fashion retail on Manhattan’s 57^th Street.

That is set to change with Tim Allis’s new book “Henri Bendel and the World’s He Fashioned” (University of Louisiana at Lafayette), which revisits the retail legend’s life from his childhood in a tight-knit Jewish family to his path to New York and into fashion’s haute salons.

The evolution of the namesake store reflected the eras of the time, from bustles-and-corsets to furs and flappers to chic tailoring, and, in later years under Geraldine Stutz, the go-to place for talents including Stephen Burrows, Perry Ellis, and Mary McFadden, and groundbreaking retail ideas, including the famed “street of shops.” Everybody wanted to be at Bendel’s.

As CFDA member Isaac Mizrahi said of the book, “In this time when history is being forgotten or worse, rewritten, it’s great to have a testament to the brilliance and quality that was Henri Bendel.”

We couldn’t agree more!