Barneys may have closed in 2020, but the famed NYC retailer lives on.
Last fall, a Barneys pop-up — featuring 40 brands and many of Barneys’ beloved alumni, including its former window dresser Simon Doonan — came alive in Soho during Fashion Week. Two TV series about the store are currently in the works, and, now, a juicy new memoir, “They All Came to Barneys: A Personal History of the World’s Greatest Store” (Viking, out Tuesday), chronicles the spectacular rise and fall of the storied institution.
“We had shot the moon, and ended up flying too close to the sun,” writes author Gene Pressman, whose grandfather founded the store as a men’s discounter in 1923.
Gene joined the family business in the 1970s, when he was in his 20s, working his way up from the warehouse to merchandising to the C-suite, before leaving the company in the late 1990s.
The book’s title actually isn’t much of an exaggeration. Movie stars, business tycoons, politicians, artists, socialites — they all did come to Barneys.
Andy Warhol showed up there every Saturday. Susan Sontag got her hair done at Barneys’ salon. Madonna and Iman modeled in a Barneys charity fashion show together. (The Material Girl also frequently dined at Barney’s’ cafe with BFF Sandra Bernhard.)
”Walk into the store, and you might stumble over Diane Keaton sitting on the floor by the door, waiting for Warren [Beatty] to finish up (it happened), or Rod Stewart in third-floor sportswear, or Mike Nichols, or Baryshnikov,” Gene writes. When Donald Trump was “in a very good mood,” his first wife Ivana told a reporter, they would head to Barneys, where he would buy 10 or 15 suits at a time.
For fashion die-hards, Barneys was heaven on earth. It was the first U.S. store to stock Armani and the Japanese cult label Comme des Garcons. Sarah Jessica Parker once said, “If you’re a decent person and you work hard, you get to go to Barneys.” (Carrie Bradshaw, her character on “Sex and the City” was a fangirl too.)
“Barneys wasn’t a store — or not just,” Gene writes, with his trademark swagger. “It was a destination, an all-day, into-the-night entertainment, with a restaurant for mid-splurge sustenance. You’d run into friends, you’d run into exes, you’d run into enemies.” He describes once seeing a woman in Japan carrying a Barneys New York bag that she had laminated as a purse. That’s how powerful the brand was.
It didn’t start out as a fashion mecca.
Barney Pressman, Gene’s grandfather, founded the store in 1923, when he pawned his wife’s engagement ring to afford the down payment on a shop on Seventh Avenue between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets.
Barney’s — it had an apostrophe back then — initially offered high-quality suits at bargain-basement prices. Barney called himself the “Cut-Rate King” and “bragged that there was nobody, and no body, he couldn’t fit.” His store boasted thousands of suits in every size, as well as an “army” of tailors across the street that offered free alterations.
Barney was short and had a stutter, but he had moxy. Even after his son, Fred, expanded the business to include new, full-price merchandise from the most rarefied brands in the world, Barney retained his Lower East Side grit. Pressman once witnessed his grandfather march up to a demanding customer twice his size and tell him, “Here’s f-f-f-five dollars for a cab, get the f-f-f-f–k outta my store.”
By the time Gene joined the fold, in 1972, Barneys had become a temple of refined elegance. His father, Fred, brought in European labels like Armani, Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent, as well as jeans. But the youthful, rebellious Pressman wanted to make it “cool.” The long-haired, hard-partying ladies’ man once interviewed a potential hire on the dance floor at Studio 54.
In 1976, he convinced Fred to let him introduce womenswear into the store. Gene, like his father did for men’s suiting, hunted down the most exciting brands from around the globe. He discovered Azzedine Alaïa in France, Gianni Versace in Italy and Yohji Yamamoto in Japan.
He also, like his grandfather, had a flair for showmanship. He asked artists and designers to embellish Levi’s denim jackets for a charity fashion show to raise money for St. Vincent’s Hospital’s AIDS ward in 1986.
“The models — nearly a hundred of them — came down the stairs high-kicking or shimmying or, in the case of [cabaret drag artist] Joey Arias, slithering on his stomach,” Gene writes. “There was even a little diva-off, when Madonna swerved in front of Iman just as she was preparing to do her walk.”
Every great department store had its famous clients, but Barneys — in its heyday from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s — attracted a particularly starry crowd. The store shut down for Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson, as well as for the sultan of Brunei, who, Gene writes, “came with two busloads of wives and attendants and three body doubles, though not a soul was there but them.”
Tom Cruise and first wife Mimi Rogers made out in the cafe. Malcolm Forbes would roar in on his motorcycle, his young blond boy-toy in the back. Warhol, “famously cheap,” always pestered Gene about getting a discount. But at least he was polite about it.
After Lauren Hutton starred in a Barneys campaign in the late 1980s, she came into the store, “scooped up armfuls of clothes, and demanded to take them all.” When she was told no, she “stormed out, vowing never to return.”
Not every celebrity behaved badly. One of Gene’s staffers recalled the time she was fitting Robert De Niro for a suit when she got word that his pal Al Pacino was arriving soon. “Let me be his fitter,” De Niro said, conspiratorially. “I’m going to come in when you’re fitting him and be his tailor.”
Things were riding high when Gene (in charge of the merchandise) and his brother Bob (he took care of the business side) decided to expand. They opened the first Barneys America store in Philly in 1989, and teamed up with the Japanese department store Isetan. A store in Tokyo followed in 1990, as well outposts in Seattle, Dallas, Manhasset and Short Hills, New Jersey. And they added a fancy Madison Avenue shop in uptown Manhattan in September 1993.
Yet they grew too quickly — and expensively. Barneys took that age-old maxim “you’ve got to spend money to make money” to the extreme. A motorcade of 30 Harleys announced its Chicago store opening, in 1992, with the designer Donna Karan riding on the back of one of the hogs.
“We had spent months recruiting all those bikers, haunting bike bars in parts of Chicago you wouldn’t want to find yourself in at night,” Gene writes. “It was worth it. We sold $65,000 worth of Donna Karan that opening weekend.”
But the costs were spiraling out of control, and not every city appreciated Barneys’ quintessentially New York sensibility. Dallas society ladies revolted when Barneys set up shop there and its hairstylist — a Vidal Sassoon protégé — refused to do their hair into the big bouffants they preferred. It filed for bankruptcy in 1996 and then spent years in legal battles with its Japanese partners. By 1998, the Pressman brothers were out.
Barneys continued limping along. Style-savvy celebs like Rihanna and Katie Holmes shopped there. And Winona Ryder was stopped there in 2000, trying to leave with a selection of unpaid merchandise. (She wasn’t charged for that, but was put on trial for shoplifting about $5,000 worth of goods from Saks the following year.)
When it finally shuttered its doors in 2020, Barneys had closed its original location and cycled through various owners. Yet it has retained a nostalgic allure, thanks in large part to “Sex and the City.”
It’s no wonder. Reading “They All Came to Barneys,” it’s hard not to long for the days when shopping was an event, an adventure — not something you do late at night on your phone in your sweatpants.
