Why New Yorkers Yearn for Barneys

On September 8, 1993, the opening night of the brand-new Barneys flagship store on Madison Avenue, the escalators shrieked. The two-hundred-and-sixty-seven-million-dollar palace of consumption was sheathed in pristine French limestone and decked out with luxe flourishes, such as custom aquariums full of saltwater fish. (A baby sand shark named Sinatra eventually had to be removed, for bullying his tank mates.) Across its nine floors, the store boasted twenty-three escalators, trimmed in goatskin leather. But construction delays meant that they didn’t start revolving until the final moments before the grand-opening party, and new escalators need at least two weeks of use to stretch out their creaks. They also reeked strongly of new leather. As starry guests including Calvin Klein and Julia Child noshed on a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of canapés, the smelly staircases transporting them around the store wailed like tormented souls, more banshee curse than siren song.

These ghosts in the machine are documented in the journalist Joshua Levine’s gleefully venomous chronicle “The Rise and Fall of the House of Barneys” (1999), written at a moment when the store was at the height of its cultural influence—and staring down a precipitous decline. “The Pressman family has steadfastly refused to cooperate with the writing of this book,” Levine wrote mischievously, of the retail dynasty that founded and stewarded Barneys through the twentieth century. The Pressmans had continued to pump money into their lavish storefronts across America even as business sagged and the store’s investors in Japan began to pull out. Yet Levine acknowledges the power that the family held, even in silence: “A dead wasp can still sting.”

When Barneys finally folded, in 2020, it was eulogized not just as a clothing store but as the lodestar of cool. Barneys, like the Met, was a New York cultural institution, and technically free of charge: customers could wear “JUST LOOKING” buttons if they didn’t want to buy anything, and salespeople would leave them to their imaginations. For decades, the creative director Simon Doonan devised irreverent window displays that often had nothing to do with clothes: an array of Mr. Potato Heads; a sexy puppet caricature of Martha Stewart sprawled across her magazines and home goods; a nativity scene featuring Hello Kitty as the infant Jesus and Bart Simpson as all three of the Magi, which piqued so many protests from Catholic groups that the store eventually took it down. If Bloomingdale’s was the popular girl in good jeans, and Bendel’s was the doyenne in ritzy baubles, Barneys, clubby and self-referential, was the goth chick in an oversized black leather bomber, whose ripped black T-shirt might have cost eight or eight hundred dollars.

It’s this vision of Barneys that forms the bulk of “They All Came to Barneys,” a new memoir by Gene Pressman, who served as the store’s creative director and C.E.O. “This is the story of Barneys: my business, my birthright,” Pressman writes, with characteristic sincerity and swagger. “It’s my story of life at the heart of it all.” There’s no mention of the screeching escalators, but Pressman describes the world of Barneys in delicious detail: the secret passageway into the Pierre Hotel, the racks of sixty thousand suits, the custom mosaic by “mad genius” Ruben Toledo bedecking the store’s cosmetics section. “The store was amazing,” he writes of the Madison Avenue palace, but he’s talking about the whole gestalt. Barneys was more than just a store; it was a vibe.

Pressman starts with some well-trodden family lore. In 1923, Barney Pressman pawned his wife’s engagement ring for a five-hundred-dollar down payment on a hole-in-the-wall storefront on Seventh Avenue and Seventeenth Street in Manhattan. Two decades earlier, the neighborhood had been the hub of New York’s shopping, dubbed “Ladies’ Mile” for its palatial department stores where women could shop safely by themselves. By 1923, however, the stores had moved uptown, and Chelsea was empty. Barney cobbled together forty men’s suits, many sourced, ambulance-chaser style, from recent widows looking to empty their husbands’ closets, and hung out a sign in the window of Barney’s, his new haberdashery: “No Bunk, No Junk, No Imitations.”

The Pressman family helmed Barneys for three generations. Barney, the patriarch, built up his menswear store for more than fifty years, selling high-quality suits at discount prices to a middle-class clientele. Fred, his son, transformed Barney’s haberdashery into Barneys, the luxury department store (too cool for its apostrophe), complete with home goods, a barber shop, and more than two hundred tailors. Bob, Fred’s son and Gene’s brother, worked as the bean counter on the financial side of the business. And Gene, our hero, was (in his characterization) a bad-boy rocker who became a titan of industry, bringing women’s fashion to Barneys and elevating the brand into a life style.

You couldn’t make up a better last name for a department-store family. Each of the Pressman men, with their well-pressed suits, knew how to press the flesh. They glad-handed with celebrities, throwing blowout parties like an AIDS fund-raiser that crammed eight hundred scene-makers into the store for a runway auction of jackets designed by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Hermès. The Pressmans also had a knack for drumming up press, concocting provocative and wildly impressive ad campaigns: see the supermodel Linda Evangelista pecking a chimpanzee on the lips, or a photo of a nudists’ colony, captioned “You’ll all need clothes.” And our narrator, the playboy impresario, is all too eager to embrace the family brand. “Over at Agnès B., a young Jean Touitou—he would go on to found the label A.P.C. years later—called me Press Man,” Pressman writes. “Because, he told me many years later, of how tightly my Levi’s squeezed my balls.”