“I took Barneys wide, opening its doors to women’s wear, to sportswear, to cosmetics, to restaurants. I took it across the country and then around the world. With a team of the best, we made Barneys young, sexy, and essential.” And we’re off, with Gene Pressman, our chatty narrator, telling us that the special Barneys sauce was “all in the mix.”
That “all in the mix” meant being the first retailer to carry designers such as Armani (“The Giorgio Armani Couture Collection. Unavailable to Everyone But Barneys.”), Azzedine Alaïa, Rei Kawakubo, and Dries Van Noten, “one of Barneys’ proudest discoveries.” It meant in-store displays with a ‘why-didn’t-I-think-of-that’ sensibility; the legendary Warehouse Sale; and, to anyone who ever walked by the Madison Avenue storefront, it meant being titillated by whatever new and outrageous window displays that Simon Doonan, the Wizard of Shock, might dream up.
At a certain point in his tell-everything memoir, even Pressman figuratively throws his hands in the air when he declares that the original name, Barney’s with the apostrophe, “wasn’t big enough for what we had in mind.” No longer was the store to be associated with its eponymous founder, Barney Pressman, but it was to become “the world’s greatest, most exciting store.” Dropping the apostrophe was more than a grammatical tweak—it was a bid for eternal retail glory. Barney’s became Barneys, and that, in so many words, is the story that Pressman has set out to tell.
In fact, two stories intertwine throughout the book: the evolution of Barneys into a unique specialty store from its early days as a discount men’s-wear store, and the making of Gene Pressman, the good-looking, bad-boy bachelor and drug-fueled downtown denizen of places like Studio 54 and the Mudd Club, into the Barneys majordomo Merchant of Cool.
Running through the tale of three generations of Pressmans—Barney; Fred, his son; and grandsons Gene and Bob—are luck, ambition, a prescient sense of fashion trends, and marketing campaigns as witty as they were memorable. Barney, known as the Cut-Rate King, was into discount volume selling. Fred, the connoisseur, brought in full-priced designer men’s wear, remaking Barneys’ image as a leader in the field; he also got into the lucrative private-label business. Meanwhile, Gene was being groomed to do pretty much everything: buying, store planning, advertising, bringing in new talent. Success bred expansion, and soon the Pressmans were taking on debt to support opening new stores.
Throughout, key dates and turning points are told in great detail. There’s the opening of the business at Seventh Avenue and 17th Street in 1923; the creation of International House, a separate building for European-made suits, in 1970; the introduction of women’s wear, in 1976; Chelsea Passage, the in-store emporium, in 1980; a separate building for women’s wear and a major charity auction for AIDS, both in 1986; the Barneys Co-op, in 1987; and the building of Barneys Madison, as it was known, in Midtown. When the doors opened on September 7, 1993, it was a 230,000-square-foot gleaming edifice of seduction, befitting its well-known tagline, “Taste Luxury Humor.” The public couldn’t shop there fast enough.
In its day, everybody did come to Barneys. Warhol (often), Elizabeth Taylor, Anna Wintour, Madonna, Charles Revson, Bianca Jagger. Star architects, graphic designers, and creative directors lent style and cachet—a young Peter Marino, especially, plus Ronnie Cook Newhouse, Marc Balet, Andrée Putman, Glenn O’Brien, and Fabien Baron, and photographers such as Helmut Newton, Sarah Moon, Steven Meisel, Elliott Erwitt, and Corinne Day. Models of the period, in particular Linda Evangelista, Lauren Hutton, and a newly discovered Kate Moss, all fetched up in Barneys ads.
So what went wrong? Why did Barneys declare bankruptcy just three years after it opened on Madison Avenue, in 1993? According to Pressman, it was a perfect storm: over-expansion in the U.S. and abroad, Japanese investors who grew nervous and backpedaled their commitment, bad press about late vendor payments, the economy, and poor communication between the brothers.
Pressman seems to lay the greatest blame on his brother for the downfall of Barneys. While he was busy overseeing and curating the merchandise, Bob was independently managing the numbers, and, per Pressman, “probably wouldn’t have cared if we were selling toilet seat covers.” (Recent news accounts of a family lawsuit amplify subsequent financial disagreements.) Like the Titanic, Barneys sank, a victim of excess and arrogance.
They All Came to Barneys is a great story, a cautionary tale of a remarkable retail institution felled by hubris, according to Pressman. But as a book, the story would have benefited from a tighter edit to tone down some of the bloat and repetition. Pressman remembers his salad days in full Technicolor. In recounting an early meeting with Doonan, he writes, “Allegedly, I’d told him I’d teach him how to enjoy all the finer things life hadn’t yet thrown in his path, like … smoking dope, and eating pussy.” Or that the cake for his 29th birthday was “decorated with a spurting cock, a vagina, and a syringe, to make the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll of it all unmissable.”
“Getting laid” is a Pressman refrain.
But long after the wild parties and shuttering of the doors, what lasts is Gene Pressman’s unshakable optimism. “If you have taste and an eye, you can have it all. I did, and so did Barneys.”
’Nuff said.
Ruth Peltason is a New York–based editor, writer, and jewelry authority. Her latest books, The Art of David Webb and Solange: Jewellery for Chromantics, were both published by Rizzoli
