Greed Was Good, Clothes Were Key, And Barneys Was At The White Hot Center

A new era was beginning in New York, one borne on a raft of new wealth and new interest in the trappings of it: design, art, fashion, excess. The markets were booming. Stocks were up, and corporate raiders were the new antiheroes. The leveraged buyout was invented; so was the junk bond. A new downtown art scene, centered in SoHo, was flush with interest and cash. We were entering the period memorialized in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, with Gordon Gekko and his decade-defining catchphrase: “Greed is good.” Cash was readily available, and it felt like the bubble would never burst. It was no accident that this was a time of major expansion for Barneys, for which we’d buy up the neighboring buildings on Seventh Avenue for an ambitious enlargement and the creation, for the first time, of a stand-alone women’s store.

We were already selling women’s wear in the two-story Duplex section at the top of the men’s store, but women wanted their own store, and I loved the idea of having my own playground. My dad, Fred Pressman, a passionate menswear connoisseur who had run the family business for decades, was more cautious. He supported me, as always, but privately he was much less sure—something I learned only later. When I came to him to say let’s open a women’s store, he told me, “That’s a great idea.” Then he said to himself, “That’s not a great idea and I hope he forgets it.”

‘They All Came To Barneys’ By Gene Pressman

$32

Penguin Random House

Not likely. We’d conquered men’s, that much was clear. The men’s store was bringing in millions of dollars a year, and expanding its fashion offering seemingly by the day; some time in the late ’70s, we made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest privately owned menswear store in the world, something I only know because some high schooler ran up to my sister Nancy in the halls to show her. Now I wanted to make that kind of impact in women’s.

The time, once again, was right. The hippies of the ’70s may not have cared for clothes besides their bell-bottoms, but the ’80s man and ’80s woman were fashion obsessed. Clothes were a key part of the urban equation, the requisite uniform for a rising new guard: the Armani-suited boardroom guys, the Comme des Garçons–wearing artists. If the ’70s had the hippies, the ’80s had a whole new demographic: the yuppies.

The term—an acronym for young urban professionals—was first coined in 1980, as a joke, almost a slur. But it quickly became omnipresent. In 1984, Newsweek declared it the “Year of the Yuppie.” The shoe fit. The young urban professionals filling up cities were coming into their own—they even had their own presidential candidate, Gary Hart, an ambitious senator who hoped to be the first yuppie in the White House. The yuppies had discretionary income and expensive taste, and were looking for somewhere to flex both.

After some hiccups in the early ’80s, the economy was booming. Having tamed inflation and dispensed tax cuts like party favors at one of his black-tie White House bashes, Ronald Reagan was presiding over a historic bull market. Starting in 1982 the stock market climbed and climbed for five years straight. There was money everywhere, and people were ready to spend.

Go to the Armani floor in the mid-1980s and all along the benches and sofas lining the walls would be the suits that had been sold, tagged, and altered, and were ready to go to their new homes. On a good day, there might be 50. Wall Streeters would come in, wanting to look like their bosses, and buy six suits at a time, with two or three shirts and a couple of ties for each. “I’ve never seen anything like that again,” one of our buyers from those days told me recently.

It was a rising tide that lifted all boats. Barneys was “the place to be,” remembers Gildo Zegna, the third generation (and namesake) of Ermenegildo Zegna, one of Milan’s premier suit makers, who Fred and his team had brought to Barneys in the early 1980s. Men’s was selling; women’s was selling. Even boys’ clothes were selling. In 1985 we did a big redesign of Boystown, the better to serve the kids of means—the kids were as spoiled as the adults. “We get the yuppies—the baby boomers who have the taste and the disposable income,” longtime Barneys executive Peter Rizzo told DNR, the menswear industry’s trade paper. “They want quality and unique things for themselves . . . and for their sons.” Several of the brands that we introduced first to New York were getting enough of a foothold to open stores of their own—Comme des Garçons opened in SoHo in 1983, and Alaïa in 1988.

The question of building a bigger, better mousetrap wasn’t if, but when.

It took a cast of thousands to design and build the downtown women’s store—we assembled so many that I probably should have had my head examined. There was Andrée Putman, the doyenne of French interiors gurus, who designed the grand Deco spiral staircase that was the centerpiece of the store. Peter Marino, well before he was the palace architect for Chanel and LVMH, who carped at Andrée the whole time. Beyer Blinder Belle (Fred’s preferred architects), plus Jean-Paul Beaujard (my mother Phyllis’s favorite decorator and antique dealer, who worked on her section and on the restaurant), plus a Japanese architect I found, Setsu Kitaoka, who was tasked with making the contemporary store next door, and whose work was so austere and customer-unfriendly I eventually had it ripped out and redone. Why have one architect making you crazy when you could have a half dozen?

In anticipation of the women’s store, we kept building out the team.

Fred had his own menswear buying team—Peter Rizzo, Tommy Kalenderian, and Jody Kuss, his stalwarts—but it was up to me to build women’s into a gang that could sustain the kind of mega new store we were envisioning. There wasn’t a master plan, exactly. We hired on instinct, bringing together a diverse and totally dissimilar group of people. That was part of the secret of Barneys’ success, and the key to its creativity. You couldn’t, as Fred loved to say, stop giving direction for one second, but you also couldn’t micromanage people or hire only in your own image. Barneys worked because everyone was so different. Some days, it felt like the inmates were running the asylum. But when it all worked, the machine hummed.

Barbara Warner joined as head women’s merchant in the early ’80s. Barbara was a classicist and an Anglophile, with a taste for luxury: cashmere, fine shirt-making, cuff links, the stuff of traditional clothing with a capital C. She’d hunt out the factories that made cashmere for Hermès and Chanel—little factories in Italy or just over the border in Switzerland—or traditional English craftspeople hand-knitting sweaters. She could be strident, even fearsome—the other buyers used to call her Angry Feet, because you could always hear her coming, even in the little Chanel ballet flats she preferred.

We needed someone to build out the contemporary department, and Anna Wintour, who I had met when she was a young fashion editor at New York Magazine, introduced me to Jayne Harkness, an English-rose type. She hadn’t meant to work in New York, or in fashion, at all: She’d wanted to be a costume designer and had been within a hair’s breadth of working for the Comédie-Française. But when that didn’t pan out, she worked with Kenzo instead, with a front-row seat to the Kenzo boom of the late ’70s. Bloomingdale’s picked up his line but couldn’t figure out how to sell it, so they persuaded Jayne to cross the ocean to show them the ropes. She and Anna, two English gals in the city, found each other quickly, and the rest is history. She was a godsend to have with us in Paris, one of the only Barneys people with fluent French—despite the Berlitz tutor that used to come to the office three days a week to do her best to teach me.

As for the contemporary market, the idea of showing cool, attainable clothes across all price ranges in one place—$22 T-shirts next to designer jeans, things like that—was still new, and Jayne was a mistress of it. She was the one who found Isaia, the young Black designer who for a time was like an entry-level American Azzedine Alaïa, selling stretchy little going-out clothes we couldn’t keep in stock. (They were so tight we called them “the pant,” the “sex skirt,” and so on. Sex really does sell.) Our contemporary department—we’d eventually call it the Co-op—would sell Basco (my Barneys house line), and the lower-priced Gaultier lines, and Stephen Sprouse, an Indiana kid who’d gone from the most clean-cut, all-American guy at RISD (this according to Chris Frantz of the Talking Heads, who met him there) to a kind of American Gaultier, a true-blue punk with a convert’s zeal who was making great clothes in Day-Glo colors, many of them inspired by his muse and former neighbor, Debbie Harry. We hit it off pronto and kept in touch for many years: We were both obsessed with rock. I loved the classics, like Zeppelin, and he loved the new guard. I never had a clue what he was talking about, so he used to send me albums, with giant labels Sharpie’d in his own hand, reading “Sprouse Approved.” I still always went back to Zeppelin.

In 1984, browsing at the Designer Collective, a trade organization that sponsored group showrooms at one or another of the New York hotels, I stumbled over a woman who would join the team and become a critical part of Barneys’ growth in women’s—stumbled almost literally, since when I met her, she was lying flat-out on the hotel floor, working away. She piqued my interest immediately, primarily because she looked so weird.

Connie Darrow was one of those fashion true believers, like Anna Piaggi and Isabella Blow, who turn artifice into art. Connie rarely appeared anywhere without her greasepaint—she spackled her face as white as a Pierrot and rimmed her eyes raccoonishly in kohl. (We later learned at the Paris shows that her preferred wake-up call was at 4:30 a.m., to give her time to put her look together.) Her trademark was a Louise Brooks bob, which she frequently crowned with an actual tiara, the only person I’ve ever known who considered tiaras office casual. She adored jewelry—she wore a million tiny rings and stones on every finger—and armored herself in Chanel suits or eveningwear (at any hour) by one of her discoveries, a New York designer named Andra Gabrielle. She could be fierce, often outright tyrannical, as we’d all come to learn: Her persona was as out-there as her look. “I think she had spent her time as a child developing that,” one of the other buyers opined to me years later. “She presented herself almost like a Diana Vreeland incarnate.” Soon enough, Diana Vreeland was ours.

We needed the whole gang. A new wave of talent in fashion had fully arrived—after the transitions of the ’70s, there was an energy in womenswear like never before. Thierry Mugler was putting on the most explosive shows of the season in Paris, filled with superheroes, aliens, bug women—dynamic, near-costume clothes. (Off the runway, his collection tended more to wasp-waisted suits and killer tailoring.) Claude Montana was remaking the silhouette, with a muscular super-shoulder and more of those tiny waists. He wouldn’t send out one model at a time—it would be 12 models, all together, all in some leathery armor, stomping down the runway like an army. Then there was Jean Paul Gaultier, like a pixie sprite, gleefully poking fun at any and every fashion piety. Madonna, then on the rise, was first a customer, then a patron, who would commission Gaultier to do the costumes, including the famous cone-breasted bustiers, for her 1990 Blonde Ambition tour.

These new guys were fearless. They referenced sex and S&M openly in their designs, played up their gayness in ways that the proper Yves Saint Laurent would never have dared. Montana used to hang out at Club Sept, a notorious Paris disco, with groups of leather men—he transmuted the leather look for men into a fashionable look for women, who eagerly snapped it up. Other designers flirted with S&M too: For one show, models were sent out in high-fashion fetish gear, walking each other up and down the runway on dog leashes. Of course, that happened to be the season we finally talked Fred into coming to see the women’s collections on the catwalk. My poor sister Nancy had to sit next to our father through the whole spectacle, one that—for all his appreciation for creativity—can’t have impressed him. He reserved his favorite word of complaint for it: “goddammit.”

Looking back today, it’s amazing how many designers who became legend all started at just this time. (Or restarted—1983 was also the year that Karl Lagerfeld took over and totally reinvigorated the moribund house of Chanel.) Flipping through an issue of Vogue in 1983, you’d find spreads of the names to know: Gaultier, Azzedine, Rei and Yohji, Vivienne Westwood. We would go on to add many more. Punky, political streetwear out of London from Katharine Hamnett and BodyMap. Moody romance from Milan, by Romeo Gigli. A little later, the dreamy, intellectual so-called Antwerp Six, an ad hoc collective (they formed, loosely, in order to go Dutch on shared London trade-show space, the only way they could afford to do the show) that included Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten. My wife, Bonnie, who had joined the Barneys gang to manage shoes and soon was expanding her purview, discovered Dries with her team on the top floor of that trade show, with a slim rail of menswear. It was mostly white shirts, schoolboyish, simple. But Bonnie saw something in them.

Despite being based in Belgium, Dries knew Barneys. He had visited when he came through New York, back in the days of the Duplex, and been amazed that Barneys not only carried the likes of Mugler and the Japanese designers but even the most fashion-forward pieces by them, the runway pieces—the “strong pieces,” as he called them. Barneys was “an iconic store,” he told me years later. When Bonnie walked into his booth and introduced herself, he was so panicked that he actually ran away. “Luckily enough, I had a friend who was more business-minded, and she explained the collection in the first moments,” Dries recalled with a laugh recently. “It was only after 15 minutes that I cooled down and came back and was able to speak to them.”

Bonnie, unflappable as ever, was undeterred by his nerves, by the fact that it was a modest collection of mostly shirts, or that it was menswear. “Just make us 36 knee-length skirts and 36 floor-length skirts to go with it, and it’s going to be okay,” she told him.

Bonnie locked up an exclusive, and we kept it for years and years. Dries became one of Barneys’ proudest discoveries, and Barneys, one his biggest retailers.

In the winter of 1985, I was doing the rounds on the fashion-social circuit, and went to the opening of the Met’s annual Costume Institute Gala. (They used to take place in December, not in May, as they famously do these days.) The Costume Institute was then under the creative direction of Diana Vreeland, the former editor of Vogue and one of the great fashion eccentrics. The exhibition was “Costumes of Royal India,” dripping in jewels and silks, not unlike La Vreeland herself. At the party afterward I ran into a guy I knew slightly, John Bodum, who by day did sales for a company called Go Silk, but was better known by night as the ultimate social connector.

John looked like the Mama Cass of the East Village, and he knew everybody: the schleppers of the Garment District, the party boys of the Pyramid Club, and every imaginable type in between. Another person he knew was a young installer on the Vreeland show, who had come from Los Angeles and was sleeping on his floor. In return for his services, Simon Doonan had been given two tickets to the party, and he gave one to Susanne Bartsch, the Swiss-born ga-ga club queen of downtown New York, and the other to John.

Out of my earshot, John elbowed Simon. “That’s Gene Pressman,” John told him. “You should really get to know him.”

The name was familiar to me. Simon was becoming known at that time as a mad scientist of window display, equal parts Dr. Frankenstein and Rocky Horror’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Born in Reading, in South East England, a place he couldn’t wait to leave, Simon was fashion-mad from birth. He escaped Reading for London, where he worked for Nutters of Savile Row, then decamped to Los Angeles in the late ’70s, where he landed at Maxfield. Tommy Perse, Maxfield’s founder, sold much of the same avant-garde European fashion that Barneys did, though doing so made him much more of an outlier in bad-style LA than we were in sophisticated New York. Maxfield, much more than Barneys, was known for black everything—“Whatever Perse wants and can’t find in black, he has made-to-order. In the past, that’s included bicycles, combs, hair dryers, hangers and linens,” the Los Angeles Times once reported—and all-black can be a drab downer. What Maxfield needed was humor to lighten it all up, and that was Simon’s specialty.

“A window must be completely ambiguous so that the viewer can make up his own mind what the story is,” Simon opined. But in his hands, ambiguous could be hysterical or insane. At Maxfield, he once filled the store’s sole window with a coffin, corpse, and well-dressed mourners holding drooping lilies, a tableau odd enough that employees claimed it caused more than one car crash outside. Other times, he’d strung up stuffed, flying cats, or molded plastic urinals; the one that most stuck with me was a group of mannequins being set upon by a horde of fake rats. I remembered I usually made a point to stop by Maxfield, the city’s best specialty store, when I was in LA. I liked anything with a little “fuck you” to it, and these windows were provocative but thoughtful. And now he was in New York.

Simon came in for an interview. He was about five feet high, with a taste for Yohji Yamamoto and a madcap imagination that could out-Wonka Willy. Simon was, by his own estimation, pretty feral at the time, but that, to me, was a selling point. I told him I wanted him to shake things up. We bonded over film—we both loved Ken Russell’s The Devils, a horror film about 17th-century French nuns that originally got an X rating—and allegedly, I told him I’d teach him how to enjoy all the finer things life hadn’t yet thrown in his path, like eating meat (he was a vegetarian), smoking dope, and eating pussy. (I don’t remember this, but Simon’s memory is better than mine.) He arrived in January of ’86, right around the time the women’s store was set to open—and didn’t, again.

Pressman projects are notoriously prone to delays; that seems to be our curse. The women’s store was no exception. We hit an underground spring during construction. We had furious tenants upstairs protesting for their apartments (we relocated them all, at our expense, and guaranteed their rents for life). The opening date lurched further and further back. No matter. We were designing for posterity. We were working around the clock to get the women’s store ready, filling the warehouse, sampling with factories in Italy, buying from designers and showrooms—and then, when the store would be delayed another season, negotiating like mad to send what we’d bought back, since we’d have nowhere to sell it yet. It was a time of pure, constant chaos—and in the meantime, we had a flourishing store, mostly men’s, but with two floors of women’s, to run.

Undaunted by the delays, Simon and the rest of the team immediately set to work anyway pulling together a summer exhibition dedicated to the Statue of Liberty, who in 1986 was celebrating her centennial. We invited artists, fashion designers, photographers, and a few locally notorious people to embellish Lady Liberty for themselves, to benefit the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Design. Fashion and art were natural bedfellows, we felt, and it wasn’t a bad way to underscore that Barneys had become every artist’s favorite store. Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kenny Scharf all participated; so did Jean Paul Gaultier, Norma Kamali, Fendi, and Hermès. It ran that summer of 1986 and would have been a big-enough undertaking for any store. For us, it was an appetizer. The long-delayed opening was, finally, nearly here.

From THEY ALL CAME TO BARNEYS: A Personal History of the World’s Greatest Store by Gene Pressman, to be published on September 2, 2025, by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2025 by Gene Pressman.