Barneys New York’s King of Cool on How the Store Lost Its Way
Sometime in the early ’90s, my parents made a weekend visit to New York and stopped at Barneys New York, which was then a single store in Chelsea. With its Andrée Putman staircase and then-far out location, it was a very New York kind of institution—not like The Met, which was more the spiritual twin of Bergdorf Goodman, but something between Studio 54 and the Soho House. Luxurious, with big personality. Maybe even a little dangerous. It was a place to see and be seen, where Cher and Basquiat hunted for Armani tailoring and clingy Gaultier mesh. Andy Warhol starred in the company’s print ads, and Glenn O’Brien was its advertising director, commissioning wry and charming Jean-Philippe Delhomme illustrations (“Ruth had multiple personalities. They all had credit cards”). It was enough of a scene-maker that book parties were held there, attended by the likes of Dominick Dunne and Norman Mailer.
Anyways: my dad, who was preppy in taste and modest in wardrobe budget, decided he wanted a blue blazer. The salesman put on a droll show, asking him to try on the $3,000 Armani blazers, just to see how they looked and felt, even though he knew my dad wouldn’t get one. Eventually the salesman showed him something more within his price range—double-breasted, gold buttons. They were having so much fun that my dad’s best friend, along for the trip, decided to get one too. It was $600, but the salesman winked and said, “Let me sharpen my pencil,” and gave him a small discount. And then the salesman treated them all to lunch at the cafe downstairs.
My parents aren’t members of the “groovy cognoscenti,” as Barneys creative-ambassador-at-large Simon Doonan described the original store’s customers to Vanity Fair in 2016. But when they visited Barneys, they felt like they were. If other stores made you feel rich (or not), Barneys made you feel like a New Yorker: wise and hip. And the man who created that feeling—at least at the time of my parents’ visit--was Gene Pressman.
Barneys filed for bankruptcy this morning, announcing that it will close all but five of its 22 stores. The Madison Avenue flagship, and a Chelsea store that opened three years ago around the block from the original, are among those that will remain open. The rent on Barneys’ Madison Avenue store nearly doubled, to $30 million, in January, which the company cited as a major factor in its bankruptcy filing. The struggles have been no secret; in 2012, Cathy Horyn, then the New York Times fashion critic, asked “What’s a Store For?” pursuing the question in extensive reporting on Mark Perry, the New York hedge fund owner who had just purchased the small chain. Perry was the store’s fourth owner in six years. The original family of owners—Barney Pressman, and his son Fred, and his son Gene—sold their remaining interest in 2004. Horyn seemed skeptical as to whether Perry could lead a store like Barneys, but she also sensed that its retail persona had already lost a lot along the way: “But it’s a sea of bags,” she told Perry when they first met, of a redesign of the store’s ground floor that had been completed just before Perry took charge. “Is that really Barneys?”
Horyn also spoke with Gene Pressman, whose father, Fred, transformed the discount menswear store into that small beacon of savvy luxury in the ’70s. It was that legacy that Gene built on through the ’80s and ’90s with his brother Bob. Gene was understandably sensitive about discussing the store, but he told Horyn, “If I had a store again, I wouldn’t have windows. My windows would be looking into the store. Because I’m done with hip windows. There’s nothing else you can do. I would be thinking about the energy from within, about creating environments, seeing hot people.”
Gene and I spoke on the phone this morning—he was eating a pastrami sandwich, his regular morning meal; I was still sipping coffee in bed, wearing Barneys-brand pajamas I got about 10 years ago at one of their famous warehouse sales. “It was never a department store,” he told me. “It was a specialty store. We didn’t have departments, so to speak. We had adjacencies. The way we merchandised—it came from our madness, if you will. From the mixing of our cauldron. I find department stores formulaic.” From 1972, when he first began working there under his father, until he left in 2004, was a golden age of retail working against formula.
While Gene has been out of the retail game for some 15 years, he still thinks about it constantly. “I know retailers like to blame it on the internet,” he said, “but that’s like back in the day, if I were to blame it on the weather. It’s relevant, but not that relevant.”
Instead, he said, the problem with Barneys was simpler, and sadder: “They stopped being interesting.”
The bankruptcy filing is surely due in part to the rise of online shopping, but Pressman pointed out that people still go to the theatre, and they still go to concerts. They might love going to restaurants more than ever before. Retail is no different, he said: “There has to be a reason for someone to go. It has to be an experience, and it has to be fun. It has to be interesting. It has to be different.”
“Barneys was a great form of entertainment,” he said. “That’s how I always viewed it: that you’re creating theatre.”
The Barneys that Pressman describes—and which was mythologized by Vanity Fair and Horyn—was understandably lost as the store changed owners and expanded. This is the second time Barneys has filed for bankruptcy, after a deal with Japanese investors, which saw the store expand rapidly across the country as well as in Japan, went sour in 1996, when Gene and Bob were still running the company.
But Pressman sees the shift at Barneys as a more fundamental change, one that started when the family left: “The emphasis is not on product. They don’t have unique products anymore, including online.”
You might walk into Barneys’ vast ground floor, the “sea of bags,” and think, instead, that it’s too much about product, perhaps at the expense of service or taste. As Perry said in response to Horyn, “I think bags are the most beautiful art in the market today.” But what Gene means is exclusivity. He and his father built Barneys’ reputation on what he called “the Pressman point-of-view”: they were the first American store to carry the designs of Giorgio Armani, after Fred discovered the designer in L’Uomo Vogue in the mid-70s. Pressman discovered Azzedine Alaia after a tip from Andrée Putnam—“This tall woman, with a very deep voice, and super high stilettos”—who took him to see the couturier in Paris, where Gene bought an entire collection of black gloves, the only ready-to-wear Alaia had available at the time. Barneys was the first American story to carry Dries Van Noten. Its buyers snagged Proenza Schouler’s entire Parsons thesis collection back in 2001, before it was the darling of the new American luxury, a staple in the wardrobes of the charity circuit set.
“Even though it created trends, it was not trendy,” Pressman said of the store in its heyday. “We have a misnomer about the word ‘trendy.’ We think it’s ‘cool.’ But trendy is not built to last.” Barneys’s cool factor, he said, was that it was “continually changing and creating new elements of surprise.”
That kind of coolness requires financial risks, though, and even when it was truly cool, and operating without the pressures of outrageous rent, the company struggled financially. When Barneys filed for bankruptcy in 1996, it had developed an industry reputation for an “arrogant attitude,” the New York Times reported. The store sometimes delayed for months payments to its smaller suppliers—the kinds of brands that built its reputation as a place for exclusivity and discovery. New brands may be a financial risk for a large department store, but, as the company’s first bankruptcy demonstrated, it’s a financial risk for young brands, too.
In fact, it isn’t that Barneys’s brand of cool has disappeared. It’s merely that the institution ceded its reputation as the chief purveyor of that coolness to smaller stores. Emerging fashion stars, like Marine Serre and Jacquemus, and even newer brands like Ludovic de Saint Sernin, have been carried for two or three seasons by Totokaelo, a Seattle import with a gleaming Soho space, and Ssense, the edgy Canadian (!) store and ecommerce site. Marine Serre, by contrast, only appeared in Barneys this past spring. Forty-Five Ten, the Dallas-based conceptual store that opened in the new Hudson Yards mall, carries those brands, plus small and strange exclusives like baseball caps embroidered with artists’ signatures made by the painter Andrew Kuo. It was the only store in New York where you could go try on the Sandy Liang fleece everyone went wild for this past winter.
Either Barneys can’t afford to take these risks, or young brands can’t afford to take them. It’s likely a mix of both: “Vendors and designers had become increasingly anxious as Barneys’ troubles began to be reported,” the New York Times reported today. Gene said he used to have “loss leaders,” brands they never expected to make money. Alaia worked totally on his own schedule, untethered to retail business realities: “He would ship two months later than everybody else, and he didn’t care. [His clothes] weren’t distributed all over the place, so if you want them that badly, you get them when you get them.”
Horyn wrote that “great stores reflect the cultural life and aesthetic priorities of a city.” It’s hard not to see Barneys’ slide from coolness, and the astronomical rent, in that light. (De Blasio’s Barneys New York!) The rapid gentrification of New York, and the cultural sameness that has come with it, even extends to the way we shop. Barneys was as much a part of New York culture as vanishing bookstores, restaurants, and cobblers. It flung New Yorkers together. “We had the customer that wanted to go on the adventure with us,” Gene said.
Still, Gene believes big corporations can still be risky—that in fact, “They have no choice. They have to be, or no one’s going to them.” A few years after he left Barneys, Gene wrote a book called Chasing Cool, in which he argued, he explained, that “corporations try to chase cool, rather than build relevance. Because if you build relevancy, then maybe [the corporation] will become cool. Cool is the outcome. It’s not a strategy.”
Originally Appeared on GQ
