EVEN IN New York, where personal shoppers are nearly as ubiquitous as dentists, Elaine Mack is in a class of her own. Mind you, there are also plenty of shops but there is nothing to match Bergdorf’s either.

Bergdorf’s as in Bergdorf Goodman, that is. If you don’t live in New York and aren’t acquainted with its ways it is hard to grasp just how seriously Bergdorf’s differs from its rivals. To begin with it sits bang in the middle of some of the most expensive real estate in the world. It is to be found at 754 Fifth Avenue on 57th and 58th street and in the immediate area, within walking distance, live some of the richest, most sophisticated and most spoiled people on earth.

The walking distance bit matters, even though plenty of customers are dropped off by chauffeur-driven cars. Speak to the doorman at Bergdorf’s, the one who stands at the entrance on 58th Street, and what you’ll find is that there are women who come to Bergdorf’s every single day of their lives (when they’re not in Palm Beach or Aspen, that is) and always, always buy something. Bergdorf’s is a home from home. It’s where they go when they’re bored and need somebody to talk to, when they need a ball dress for a charity do and when they get the notion that all they need is the darling little handbag they saw on that counter near the door and happiness will be theirs.

Why did the British writer Plum Sykes, who lives in New York, called her skit on the world of the spoiled Park Avenue princess Bergdorf Blondes? Because nothing but Bergdorf’s would have cut it. Barney’s Blondes or Bloomingdale’s Blondes? I don’t think so.

If anybody understands their world, can read their minds, knows exactly how to give them the clothes their lives require it has to be Elaine Mack. Elaine is the most famous of Bergdorf’s many personal shoppers. In fact she more or less invented the genre. It was way back when the store was still owned by the Goodman family (these days it’s part of the Neiman Marcus group) and although there was a New York branch (above which the family lived), Mr Goodman (or possibly Mrs Goodman) wanted a branch near his country home in Westchester. So he opened one. He called on the young housewives of the area to staff it in shifts.

The young Elaine Mack, then newly married, was one among the many. From the start she stood out. It wasn’t long before she was selling more than any of the other saleswomen. “We were all trained by Mr Goodman in the ‘Bergdorf’ way,” she says. “He impressed upon us that Bergdorf’s was a ‘full service’ store. What he meant by this was if a woman came in to buy, say, a raincoat, one should try to provide her with an umbrella, some gloves, a handbag, to go with it. He believed that this was how you serviced a client.” She’s much too diplomatic to point out that this way, of course, the store also made a bigger profit.

From there she “started going all over the store pulling a look together and from that grew a kind of personal shopping service which we called the Workable Wardrobe. Then we started doing Closet Clinics and Trunk Shows and, meanwhile, in the New York branch Betty Halbreich had started her service called Solutions.”

“When the Westchester branch closed down Mr Goodman begged me to go to the Fifth Avenue store. I agreed if I could do just three days a week.” She’s been doing it ever since.

She’s in at 7am, calling up her favoured customers, pulling looks together, filling up the rails, getting ready to tempt the customer of the day, and she’s often there until 7pm. “For a special customer, I’ll do any hours, come in on Saturdays or Sundays, but on the whole I try to stick to my three days.”

Seeing Elaine Mack at work up close and personal is awesome. She isn’t pushy. She isn’t dictatorial. Her key technique is to make her customer feel a million dollars. “The most important thing of all is liking people. I would never go up to somebody and say ‘May I help you?’ I try to think of something nice to say instead — like, ‘Isn’t that a nice handbag you’ve got?’ ” (Funny that — all over the store on the day I visited I was stopped by friendly assistants telling me how much they like my skirt.) “And I’d never tell anybody they looked bad. I might say, instead, something like — have you tried a longer skirt or do you think a fitted jacket would suit you?”

The service her faithful customers get is also awesome. Most of them come in twice a year and she has several English clients, at least one of whom comes twice a year every year “even when the dollar isn’t low”. She has another “client who lives just outside Chicago and she comes a couple of times a year but I also know that she goes to a personal shopper in Chicago so I try and make sure I send her brochures and pictures of things that I know the other personal shopper doesn’t have access to.

“I have another customer who lives in California. She had a black tie do to go to and nothing to wear. I sent her four gowns on approval. She tried them on and we discussed it all over the phone. She has a Bergdorf Goodman card and she paid for the transport but it made her happy.”

Inevitably, the relationship often becomes very personal. “There they are, partially naked, all their defences down. I get to know their sorrows and their joys. I’ve been part of two divorce settlements — the husbands each gave their ex-wives a session with me as a last hurrah. Oh, yes, they did put limits on them but I can tell you they were very generous ones.”