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.
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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.
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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.”
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