Do I Look Fat?(Loehmann's Inc.)

What is it about the Ansonia Hotel, at Broadway and Seventy-third Street, that makes people want to take off their clothes? In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, naked men, sometimes ten thousand of them a week, used to hang out downstairs in the sauna, Turkish baths, and massage parlor of the Continental Baths, where Bette Midler got her start (clothed), singing torch songs poolside, accompanied by Barry Man-ilow, to an audience of men wearing white towels (black towels on formal nights)--the very same outfit worn by the undercover cops who frequently raided the place. In 1977, women started getting naked, too, when the baths reopened as Plato's Retreat, the heterosexual swingers' club. (Of course, they might have been there for the all-you-can-eat buffet of bagels, lox, and Scotch.)

Look for more skin at this location now that it has been transformed into the newest branch of Loehmann's. Many New York women have traumatic memories of zaftig matrons in giant bras and girdles preening in front of mirrors in the famous communal dressing room, and asking strangers to unzip them, while bored husbands sat in soiled armchairs by the curtained doorway, hoping to catch a glimpse of thigh. As one veteran shopper said recently, "As a child, everything scary I knew about women and female anatomy I learned in that dressing room."

The new branch has more than twenty private dressing rooms, but it has kept a communal room, too. Fred Forcellati, the store's advertising and creative director, says, "The older customer prefers the shared experience." One afternoon during the week before the opening, Forcellati was standing in the communal dressing area, a space thought to have housed the "privateencounter rooms" of the Continental Baths. He was fully dressed (though partly bald), mostly in garments that he found in Loehmann's men's department--a plaid Ralph Lauren shirt, Diesel jeans, a mustard-colored corduroy blazer from DKNY.

Forcellati was dealing with a snag having to do with the escalators. A few days earlier, a pipe left from the old steam room had cracked and caused a small section of the ceiling to collapse. (A less romantic theory linked the cracked pipe to the meat ...