They All Came to Barneys
A Personal History of the World's Greatest Store
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
During the greatest, most exciting years in the world’s greatest, most exciting city, Barneys New York was the world’s greatest, most exciting store, a place where fashion made culture and made history. In They All Came to Barneys, Gene Pressman tells his story for the first time, capturing the unprecedented rise and unimaginable fall of his family’s multimillion-dollar fashion retail empire as only he could: From the inside
From its humble beginnings as a discount shop on 17th Street—born in 1923, before Mickey Mouse, social security, and the chocolate-chip cookie—Barneys grew to become an international phenomenon, setting the tone for fashion not only in New York, but across the country and worldwide. (Barneys’ black shopping bags became so iconic that the most devoted customers laminated theirs and carried them forever.) Told with razor-sharp wit and inimitable style, They All Came to Barneys takes us on an insider’s journey to see how, as rakish, would-be rocker Gene Pressman and the global fashion industry grew up and came into their own, side by side.
Through back-room handshake deals with designers, days at the haberdasheries Savile Row and nights out at New York discos and Paris boîtes, three generations of Pressmans—grandfather Barney, son Fred, and grandson Gene, each wildly different but united in their love of the finest stuff, and of each other—built Barney’s little shop into an empire and a byword for cool around the world. They All Came to Barneys is a front-row seat to the rise of some of the biggest names in fashion—Armani, Alaïa, Wintour, Meisel—and the store that came to dress an entire generation of celebrities, models, artists, and magnates. Set against the biggest movements in fashion and in culture, from the birth of ready-to-wear in the ’60s to the devastation of AIDS in the ’80s and the explosion of globalization in the ’90s, Gene Pressman had a backstage pass to history—until hubris, ambition, and risky business threatened to tear it all apart…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pressman (Chasing Cool), former creative director of New York City department store Barneys and the grandson of its founder, traces the retailer's rise and fall in this mostly self-aggrandizing account. In 1923, Barney Pressman pawned his wife's engagement ring to open a menswear store in downtown Manhattan, where he sold deeply discounted suits purchased from retailers at the season's end—a formula that fueled the store's expansion and catapulted the family into wealth. Barney's son Fred took over in the late 1960s, shifting the store's focus to upscale goods sourced from European designers; later, the author assumed control along with his brother Bob Pressman. The two added women's clothes to their inventory and financed new stores in the U.S. and abroad. Yet mounting expenditures and distrust between the brothers led to the company's 1996 bankruptcy; by 1998, both Pressmans had stepped down, Barney and Fred were dead, and the family had lost most of its stake in the company. Despite some vivid glimpses inside the New York City fashion world, the narrative loses its luster as the author's defensiveness takes over ("Where everything has now been democratized to the point of being a fucking bore, Barneys had a point of view"). He can also be dismissive, as in his response to complaints about the store's elitism: "We weren't elitist. We were elite. That's a big difference." There's potential for an engrossing story here, but Pressman stumbles in his desire to set the record straight.
