When Neiman Marcus opened in 1907, it was one of the few outposts in a luxury landscape as empty as the Texas prairie town where it was founded.

Contrast that with today's retail landscape, where shopping malls and city streets lined with high-end shops abound and everyday people - not just the very wealthy - vie for the glitziest name brands, if not the best quality that money can buy.

But where some retail institutions have gone by the wayside, Neiman Marcus continues to thrive - in spite of, or perhaps even because of - the changing world around it.

On Monday, the venerable retailer, which has supplied thousands of well-heeled patrons the nation over with sumptuous designer clothing, jewelry, crystal, china and silver from around the world, created the ultimate "Christmas Book" holiday gift catalog, and the first "his and hers Beechcraft airplanes," will celebrate its 100th anniversary.

The event has been deemed so important in the fashion world that Women's Wear Daily has devoted an entire issue to the milestone, and fashion designers have created exclusive items for the store's 370-page catalog, "the book," starting with a $44,000 beige-dyed chinchilla jacket with hand-braided leather from Chado Ralph Rucci to an $18,000 embroidered pale gray silk gown with hand-dyed and painted ostrich feathers by Olivier Theyskens for Nina Ricci, and ending, on the last page, with a pair of emerald, diamond and platinum earrings from the store's precious jewels salon for $1.9 million.

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