My mother kept the Spiegel catalog on the little marble-topped table by the front window in our row house in Bloomfield. She would underline things in soft pencil, and once a year, in the week before Easter, she would sit down with a cup of coffee and place an order over the telephone. I have been thinking about that catalog quite a bit lately, because every few months a friend at the Carnegie Library asks me the same question. Whatever happened to Spiegel? Can a person still order from them?
The short answer, as of January 2026, is no. The longer answer is a fairly remarkable American business story, and worth telling properly.
A Chicago house founded after the Civil War
It turns out Spiegel is older than most of the catalogs people remember from the 1970s and 1980s. Joseph Spiegel, a Prussian immigrant and a Confederate prisoner of war, opened a small home furnishings shop in Chicago in 1865, the same year Lincoln was assassinated. For its first three decades it was a furniture and housewares store, nothing more. The mail-order catalog people of my generation grew up with did not appear until 1905, after his son Arthur Spiegel pushed the family into the catalog business and, importantly, into installment credit. The Winnetka Historical Society credits the Spiegels as genuine pioneers of buying on time, which sounds quaint now but was a real innovation when most working families could not put down the full price of a sofa.
By the early twentieth century Spiegel was a household name. Their buyers traveled to Paris and brought European silhouettes back to American women who had never been east of Pittsburgh. That part of the story is well documented and is one reason the catalog held a particular place in middle-class women's wardrobes through the Eisenhower years and well past Watergate.
The Otto years and the empire that came with them
What most people do not realize is that for most of the catalog's later life, Spiegel was not American-owned. The German mail-order giant Otto Versand acquired a controlling interest in 1982, and under that ownership Spiegel went on a buying spree. They picked up Eddie Bauer in 1988 and the women's clothing house Newport News in 1993. By the late 1990s the Spiegel Group was a serious force in American direct mail, with the credit card business as the engine humming under the hood.
That credit card business is also what brought the whole enterprise down.
The 2003 bankruptcy
In March 2003, Spiegel Inc. filed for Chapter 11. Industry coverage at the time, including Women's Wear Daily, blamed a credit card portfolio that had gone badly sour. The company emerged from bankruptcy in 2005 reorganized around its strongest asset, Eddie Bauer, and the Spiegel and Newport News catalog businesses were sold off separately to a group led by Golden Gate Capital and Pangea Holdings. Spiegel and Eddie Bauer, which most shoppers had assumed were one company, went their separate ways.
From there the Spiegel name passed through several hands in fairly short order. Granite Creek Partners held it briefly. In June 2009 it went to Patriarch Partners, a private equity firm run by Lynn Tilton, which also owned Newport News by that point. The two were folded into an entity called Signature Styles, LLC.
The second bankruptcy and the slow fade
Signature Styles filed for Chapter 11 in June 2011, only two years after the Patriarch deal. That is the bankruptcy that older shoppers may remember most painfully, because the company stopped honoring gift cards and would not process returns on orders that had already shipped. The Consumerist ran a sad little piece about customers being sent to collections after trying to return merchandise. Newport News effectively went away at that point. Spiegel limped on.
The print catalog, the thing my mother circled with her pencil, was discontinued around 2012. From then forward Spiegel was a digital-only operation, pushing email and a website rather than mailing the heavy book. The brand made one notable splash in 2016, when it featured the transgender model Arisce Wanzer on the cover of its digital catalog, a first for an American fashion direct seller and a small bit of trivia worth recording.
What happened after 2019
Here is where the story turns quiet, and where I have to be careful not to embroider. According to the Wikipedia entry for Spiegel and several archived references, the company abruptly ceased operations during the winter of 2019 to 2020. The website came down. There was no farewell letter, no closeout sale that I have been able to verify, no press release of any consequence. Patriarch Partners itself was tied up around the same time in a long-running civil fraud matter brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which probably explains a great deal about why the wind-down was so silent.
I went looking, in early 2026, to see whether anything had changed. As of this writing, spiegel.com does not resolve to a working storefront. There is no Spiegel print catalog being mailed in the United States. I could not find any credible 2024 or 2025 news of a brand revival, a buyer, or a relaunch. If something is in the works, it has not surfaced publicly. The Spiegel name, after 154 years, appears to be sitting on a shelf.
A small note on confusion that comes up often. The German news magazine Der Spiegel, at spiegel.de, is a completely separate company and is very much alive. It has nothing to do with the Chicago catalog house.
So what should a Spiegel shopper do now?
If what you loved about Spiegel was the elegant, slightly European cut of the women's clothing, two long-running American catalogs are still very much in business and tend to satisfy former Spiegel customers. Talbots still mails a print book and remains the closest match for the classic, ladylike Spiegel sensibility. Boston Proper, for those who liked the more contemporary Newport News end of the family, also still publishes.
A few practical suggestions for anyone trying to track down Spiegel pieces or fill the gap:
- Vintage Spiegel clothing turns up regularly on resale sites, and there is a small collector market for the older catalogs themselves on eBay if you want one for the kitchen shelf.
- For new clothing in a similar spirit, browse the women's fashion catalogs we keep up to date on Catalogs.com. Talbots, Soft Surroundings, Appleseed's, and Roaman's are all still operating and still mailing print books, which is not nothing in 2026.
- If you held an unused Spiegel gift card or store credit from the 2011 bankruptcy, sadly that money is gone. Oak Point Partners acquired the remnant assets of the Signature Styles estate in 2012, and there is no consumer recourse at this point.
It is a strange thing to see a brand that lasted from the Andrew Johnson administration to the Trump administration go out without so much as a goodbye. But that is the truth of it, at least as best as I can verify in January 2026. If anything changes, and a buyer puts the Spiegel name back on a catalog cover, I will be the first one in line for the mailing list.
