Barneys is about to be trending once again.
The department store that was once the ultimate shopping destination has been absent from the retail landscape since 2019, but a series of books, auctions and streaming series are suddenly celebrating its legacy.
First out is “They All Came to Barneys,” a memoir from Gene Pressman, a member of the third generation of the family that founded the store, and the man most responsible for making it the epicenter of a certain kind of New York cool. The book has already been optioned for adaptation, and a separate Barneys drama from the team that created “Gossip Girl” is being produced by Amazon MGM Studios.
From September through December, there will be five separate auctions of pieces from the estate of Fred and Phyllis Pressman highlighting the family’s taste. Fred, Gene’s father, transformed the cut-price men’s store his father, Barney, founded in 1923, into a designer emporium.
At Barneys, Fred and eventually Gene and his brother, Bob, brought brands like Armani and Alaïa to the United States, not to mention Comme des Garçons and Dries Van Noten. People came from all around to buy established designers and upstarts. You were as likely to see Nan Kempner as Madonna wandering the racks.
But overexpansion and, some said, grandiosity (others said global economic woes and a bad retail climate) felled the Pressmans, and in 1996 the family declared bankruptcy and was forced out. A series of corporate owners sanded the edges off the store, and it lost much of its ineffable allure. Six years ago, it once again declared bankruptcy, and this time there was no coming back.
The store may be gone, but the myth lives on, especially as people become nostalgic for the 1990s. To explain why, Mr. Pressman, 74, Zoomed in from his house in West Palm Beach, Fla., where he lives with his second wife, Christine, and their 6-year-old son.
Why did you finally write this book? It’s been almost 30 years.
Everybody has a Barneys story, but I didn’t think the real story was ever told.
The real challenge was remembering things accurately. So much of it was a blur, and not just because of drugs. It was the fast pace we were on for almost 30 years. I used to give my people hell if they didn’t come back from Europe with new finds. The pressure was always on.
What was one of your favorite discoveries?
In the late 1970s, Lance Karesh, who designed our men’s line BASCO with me, told me I had to go to Tokyo and see this line called Comme des Garçons, which I had never heard of. The woman who did it, Rei Kawakubo, was the girlfriend of Yohji Yamamoto, and I loved Yohji because he played guitar and I played guitar.
She didn’t speak a word of English, but she would smile a lot. When they started showing in Paris, the French poo-pooed them because they didn’t think their clothes were feminine enough.
Anyway, I used to give these parties at this Moroccan restaurant, Chez Omar, And I would invite only Barneys buyers, designers and no press. One time I hired a belly dancer, and she was moving around and sort of putting her body, her booty, almost in Rei’s face. And Rei just contorts. She freaks out. I think it was going beyond the boundaries she could tolerate. But she also got it, like I got her clothes. I had never seen anything like them.
Do you think that’s why people care so much about Barneys?
We were not a department store. We were a specialty store. Now it’s a sea of sameness, but Barneys was a cultural event and a social event. Our clientele was second to none. We had the straight guy, the gay guy, the business type, the conservative guy, the artsy guy, the women, the young girls. It became like their playground and hangout.
Britney Spears would get ushered up through the back elevator to get to the V.I.P. room, but other celebrities didn’t care.
Jack Nicholson would get out of the elevator and yell, “There’s a sale on ladies’ lingerie on the fourth floor.” Richard Simmons would start screaming and yelling like he did in his exercise routine, and people would join in. Most customers didn’t harass them because everybody was a celebrity, at least in their own minds.
What’s the most anyone spent in a single shopping trip?
One woman — her husband was a financier — spent a million dollars in one day in the 1980s. That takes talent.
That’s almost $4 million today.
We actually marked it on the calendar — Ms. So and So’s day — because you always want to do better than the year before. We closed the store down for some people: Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, the Sultan of Brunei.
You call yourself lucky, and it sounds as if it was good while it lasted, but it didn’t last.
In totality, my life has been extraordinary. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But I also had to come to terms with the things that were not so good. It got ugly, really ugly, and I had to tell that story. It was not fun, I will tell you.
Do you have regrets? What would you have done differently?
If I still owned Barneys, it would be doing very well, in spite of what retail is, because, in the Barneys tradition, it would have been something else. So, for example, I would have shrunk the retail. I would have closed all the small stores and kept Beverly Hills and New York. In those days, between those two stores, they were doing about $600 million a year, and I would have sold online. I would have fought like hell to have exclusives and perpetuate young designers, like we always did.
But then I would have added things like a concert hall or a food hall, and opened condos and resorts and hotels. I mean, who wouldn’t have bought into a beautifully designed building, a Barneys condo? And I would have gotten into media. We could have subsidized great films or great shows or concerts, or had a Barneys theater or Barneys restaurants.
Do you still follow fashion?
I’ve been watching the musical chairs of young designers. It’s good to give them opportunities. I’m really appalled by the pricing. It’s obnoxious, and even the richest customers I know are insulted by it.
Who are your go-to designers?
There’s a great manufacturer that my father was close with, one of the best in Italy, called Belvest. We turned Burberry onto them a long time ago, and they made the Burberry suits. Jean-Louis Dumas of Hermès asked my dad if he could suggest a great suit manufacturer for Hermès, and my father suggested Belvest. Then Patrizio Bertelli of Prada asked me. I told them Belvest.
So Belvest is the best kept secret on the planet. I used to go there to get all my made-to-measure and custom suits, and I still would.
I also like Uniqlo. Their prices are good, and their stuff is kind of modern, classic, but commoditized in a cool way. I go to antique stores, but I don’t enjoy vintage stores. They all look like outposts of Chanel.
You, the ultimate New Yorker, now live in Florida. Are you in exile?
I lived in a hotel at the Westchester Country Club for 10 years, and then one day I just said, “Let’s try Palm Beach.” I deplored Florida for so long. It gave me the hives. But Florida has a lot of things to offer, and because so many people from the Northeast move down here, they really improved culture, schools and hospitals. You can walk everywhere. It’s more private than New York, and you feel like a human.
We go back to New York once in a while. I do miss the density of culture. Very few cities in the world are like New York, even if it is down. But I don’t miss the garbage, I don’t miss the traffic, and lately I don’t miss the vacancies on the front doors of all the stores.
Did you ever go back to Barneys?
I tried to shop there a few times. I would buy underwear and socks, maybe sunglasses. Everybody would say hello to me, which was nice, and tell me “We wish you were here.” And ask if I could buy it back.
Well, did you try to buy it again?
Once. We bid from the vulture fund guys, the creditors. But Jones of New York outbid us by, like, $15 million and got it. They kept it for like four years, and then they sold it to a sovereign wealth fund for almost a billion dollars and made a cool profit of, I don’t know, $700 million or something. At one point, I entertained the idea of buying Bergdorf Goodman. It would have been the greatest revenge ever.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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