Style Points is a column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.
A 1972 commercial imagined a young Barney Pressman sitting on a Brooklyn stoop with young Humphrey Bogart and young Louis Armstrong, talking about what they dreamed of doing someday. Bogie and Armstrong spun their visions of Hollywood and jazz glory. But, Barney said cannily, “You’ll all need clothes.”
The real-life Pressman was the founder of the namesake store Barney’s, established in 1923 as a discount menswear stalwart. (“No Bunk, No Junk, No Imitations” was its frills-free slogan back then.) Decades later, it would lose its apostrophe, add “New York,” and assume downtown cool as nonchalantly as you might throw on a shawl-collared sweater. The department store model could feel stuffy or rote, but Barneys New York always elevated the experience, with sleek Peter Marino-designed interiors, an international stable of designers, and events that made it feel more like Studio 54 than a store.
In his new book, They All Came To Barneys, out today, Barney’s grandson Gene Pressman, who became the store’s co-CEO, creative director, and head of merchandising and marketing, chronicles the way Barneys became interwoven with the changing landscape of 20th-century fashion. Pressman’s father, Fred, introduced Giorgio Armani to an American audience, and later Gene himself would expand the retailer’s repertoire, bringing French designers like Thierry Mugler, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Claude Montana and avant-garde Japanese labels like Yohji Yamamoto into the fold. Amid the envelope-pushing, though, they retained retro touches, like the hat department on the ground floor. When, as Pressman tells it, “some bean counter” deemed it unnecessary and got rid of it, sales suffered. “It wasn’t about selling hats,” Pressman writes. “It was about the charm of the experience, the old-worldliness of it.”
Over several decades, the Chelsea flagship became the anchor of a changing New York, reflecting the world around it. When AIDS began affecting gay men in the fashion community, it remained taboo and little-spoken-of. But Simon Doonan, then a window dresser at the store, suggested they do a benefit for St. Vincent’s Hospital, and Pressman eagerly agreed. That 1986 charity runway show featured Madonna and Iman as models, and attracted Andy Warhol and John Galliano as guests.
In 1995, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell feted downtown darling Steven Sprouse at the New York store, and that same year, the L.A. flagship hosted the post-premiere party for the Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped, drawing both Cindy Crawford and the Beverly Hills fire department (due to the amount of indoor smoking that was taking place).
After signing a deal with Isetan, the Japanese department store company, Barneys spread beyond its New York bounds, becoming a fixture in high-end malls by the ’90s. But Manhattan was still its spiritual center, as was clear from the ad campaigns featuring New York denizens Spike Lee, Harvey Keitel, and Sandra Bernhard. Barneys even became the first high-end store to wade into the previously verboten territory of top-of-the-taxi advertising. And NYC-set shows like Seinfeld and Sex and the City featured characters shopping there. (Sarah Jessica Parker once told a reporter, “If you’re a decent person and you work hard, you get to go to Barneys.”) The store served as a kind of beacon of New York to fashion enthusiasts around the world. When Pressman was on a business trip to Japan, long before the store expanded internationally, he saw a woman carrying a Barneys shopping bag she had had laminated to serve as a handbag.
Doonan’s topical, surreal window displays also drew people into the store. A 1988 tableau depicted Nancy Reagan leaving the White House, airline tickets in hand, while 1993 saw a mash-up of Edward Scissorhands and the Lorena Bobbitt scandal. A 1994 display by artist Tom Sachs, based on the Nativity scene but swapping in Hello Kitty and Bart Simpson for the usual participants, incited the ire of the Christian right.
Pressman had exited stage left by Y2K, but the store continued under different owners, and continued championing the emerging and avant-garde. When it finally closed for good in 2019, it felt like a part of New York had died. The nostalgia for Barneys, however, certainly hasn’t waned. In September, Hourglass Cosmetics “revived” the beloved store with a temporary pop-up featuring designers like Presley Oldham and Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen. Pressman’s book will be adapted for TV by writer Beth Schacter and director Joe Wright. And Gossip Girl creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage have their own Barneys project brewing at Amazon MGM. So at least on the small screen, the story is far from over.
