Gene Pressman Says Luxury Is Now an 'Airport Store'

After making Barneys a lasting part of the zeitgeist, Pressman reflects on his store's successes and failures, and diagnoses fashion's current crisis.

“Once you’ve tried caviar, it’s hard to eat spam,” is one of many memorable lines from Gene Pressman’s new book They All Came to Barneys. His grandfather Barney pawned his wife’s engagement ring to start the store in 1923 as a discount men’s suit shop with a sign that read, “No Bunk, No Junk, No Imitations.”

Decades later, Barney’s son Fred transformed the store into a luxury retailer with a new slogan: “Select, Don’t Settle.” “I didn’t want to sell low-end merchandise,” Fred said in the 1960s. Though the risk created what he called an “identity crisis” for the store, the gamble paid off for decades.

Fred’s son Gene, who grew up in Harrison, New York, freely admits in the book he was more interested in drugs and sex in the sixties than studying. He enrolled in Syracuse University, where he joined a party fraternity and bought his papers. He did just well enough to avoid getting kicked out and, along with it, the Vietnam draft. Gene was a cinephile who thought he might become a director, so he tried Hollywood after school, but things didn’t work out and he returned to New York. He then joined the family business, ultimately turning Barneys into a high-fashion emporium that launched designers like Rei Kawakubo in the U.S. Barneys closed in early 2020, but it lives on less as a store than a fixture of the zeitgeist, immortalized on shows like Sex and the City and Gossip Girl.

Gene with his parents on Carnaby Street in the mid-1960s. (Courtesy: Gene Pressman)

Gene’s book (which Gene takes care to tell me was written in collaboration with journalist Matthew Schneier) documents the rise and fall of Barneys, ending with his family losing control of the company in 1998, which ushered in an era of well-publicized financial problems and rotating backers. “They dismissed most of the merchants who remembered the Pressman era, and set about uncharming Barneys,” Pressman writes. “They stripped it of everything that had defined it and turned it into a robot’s paradise.”

You might say the same thing about the luxury fashion industry today; what used to feel feisty and unpredictable has become a familiar churn of the same handful of creative directors, logo-emblazoned merchandise, and risk-averse campaigns and runway shows. Meanwhile, Luxury retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus feel like they’re at death’s door. “The big stores are dead in the water for many reasons. They all look the same. I call them airport stores because they're not even merchants anymore. It's just a real estate deal,” Gene told me.

Nearly every day, we’re hearing about how the luxury industry is bleeding customers and facing an unprecedented vibe shift, if not all-out crisis. So I was curious to get Gene’s gloriously unfiltered take on all of that, in addition to hearing his memories about Barneys.

Giorgio Armani died shortly before I called you. You talk about him at length in the book. Can you reflect on his legacy?

My dad discovered him in the early seventies and signed him to a 10-year deal. That was really momentous for Barneys and for him. Up until that time, Barneys was a suit store. Men wore suits as uniforms, the workforce was very conservative, and their go-to stores besides Barneys were Brooks Brothers and Paul Stuart. Armani completely changed the way men thought about suiting. He made them sexy and slouchy and deconstructed, in amazing fabrics.

I think it took him quite a long time to get the respect in women's that he had in men's. In men's, he overpowered everything, but in women's, other people were more important. John Fairchild [who ran Women’s Wear Daily before founding W] used to sing the praises of Yves St. Laurent, who, just year after year, dominated the pages. When I was in Paris, I was always saying, “I hope Giorgio catches up, that would be great for us.” And eventually he did. The fashion industry didn't view Italy in the same way as they viewed France and Paris.

Barneys big impact on fashion, of course, was introducing a lot of brands to the American market. Which ones stand out to you?

In 1979, I went to Tokyo with a men's buyer of mine. He kept saying to me, “You’ve got to go to Tokyo, these people are so funky.” He was from Brooklyn, and he had a great sensibility — he just lived and died by thrift shops. We weren't chic enough to call them vintage in those days. It's sort of like the word “luxury” — they put it on toilet paper.

So I went and I was taken aback. I met this young woman who was very shy and super-talented, and her name was Rei, and I couldn't understand why her line had the French name Comme des Garçons. She had a boyfriend named Yohji Yamamoto, who was equally creative. We brought those lines back to the American market. I had already been buying Issey Miyake, because he had been showing in Paris for years. I was buying Kenzo as well, which I love.

We weren't afraid to find things. I would always tell my buyers, “Don't come home unless you bring me new things.” The Belgians — Dries Van Noten, Helmut Lang. Azzedine Alaïa was such a character. He was so irreverent and badass, if you will. And he was so talented and he didn't give a damn. And I related to that.

Barneys sale in 1934. (Courtesy: Gene Pressman)

When you were buying these new brands, how risky did that feel to you? I know from your book that it felt essential, but was there also some risk that you were worried about?

I believe in my taste level, in my eye, and I am a detail freak. I'm maniacal about it. And I always think that if I like something, other people will like it. I might sound obnoxious, but I really felt that way. I think that we were in a position to be leaders and taste makers. I had this expression, “Never give your customer what they want, because they don't know what they want.” They want you to tell them. And that was really the charm of Barneys — you walk in there and you just see new things all the time. We loved to turn people on to new things and educate then about quality and how things were made. We deplored head-to-toe anything. We hated it. We believed in individual style. A lot of people want direction.

I’m fearful of sounding old. A lot of older people who might've had wonderful experiences have a habit of saying, “Everything was better when I was younger.” And it might've been, but I don't think that should be articulated because there are a lot of great, talented young people today. The only difference is they might not have the same opportunities.

In what sense?

The biggest difference today is the accountants are running the businesses, not the creatives. Every industry, whether it's motion pictures or television or film or publishing — it's owned by three people. And so either everything's recycled or they just throw so much shit up against the wall until something sticks. And I just think that's the wrong way to be.

Everything is so generic. Sort of like the word influencer. I don't mean to insult Barneys, but Barneys was the greatest influencer. And look at it today, it's been closed for six years. And quite frankly, when my family and I left in ‘98, I just thought it went downhill. But the legacy was so strong that regardless of the different transformations, it stayed very relevant.

The store’s success really hinged on your taste and gut instinct, then. Where did your taste come from? Was it an extension of your father?

My father was very privileged. He got to travel a lot. His family lived in Stamford and then in Greenwich. The family had great taste and a great eye, and it rubbed off on him, and then passed to me. I couldn't help but be sensitive about my environment because my mother and father were such great tastemakers that I had no choice. But he always was enamored with European fashion.

He asked Hubert de Givenchy, who was at the time very big in women's, to please send him a woman's coat with a fur collar, and would he mind if he adapted it to menswear? And Hubert said, “No problem.” He then went on to bring Brioni to America and Zegna to America. By 1969, they had built a huge building adjacent to the existing Barneys on Seventeenth Street and Seventh Avenue that was called the International Building.

Then I took the baton. Menswear started drifting away from suits and going into sportswear. Men didn't want to wear suits all the time. They wanted to wear something more casual, but still sophisticated. So I started bringing in European lines in that did that, and that again brought in a whole new customer. In 1976, I decided that Barneys should have women's.

Gene Pressman. (Courtesy: Gene Pressman)

Talk about how you introduced women’s wear, which really made the store what it became in pop culture.

I didn't want it to be Brooks Brothers for women's or Paul Stuart. I wanted Barneys to really represent women's in a very high fashion way — younger and with real purpose so that we could compete with the uptown stores.

People who lived uptown never went below Forty-Second Street because they thought they'd get a nose bleed. It was hard to bring people downtown. We had free parking, we gave free alterations. But what was amazing is that people from all over the country, including the West Coast, and people from Europe and South America, were all going to Barneys more than the people in New York. The better manufacturers didn't want to sell Barneys in New York because Barneys was a discount store. So my father went to Europe, and every line there was thrilled to sell to him because they had never been to New York, and they were so happy to sell any store in New York. Ironically, that led to us getting every American line.

I've always been a fighter. I don't just take creativity for granted. You have to work at it. You’ve got to be a perfectionist. You can't lie to yourself. You have to say, “Is this book really good? Are people going to like it?” That's why I'm doing it, and I'm really happy that people are enjoying it.

Today, it’s so much about data. I can only imagine if you're a retailer and you're trying to figure out what to sell, you're just looking at numbers and trend reports and stuff like that, whereas you're talking about going by instinct.

As I said, the accountants are running the insane asylum. It's funny, people blame the demise of retail on the internet and all of that, but honestly, that's not the reason. Twenty years prior, big stores were marking down merchandise that they couldn't sell weeks and even months early and training their customer to only buy on sale. And once they did that, the game was over.

But yeah, it's a combination of data, and again, three companies or three individuals own each industry. So it's very tough to not be risk averse. I think it's messed up everything. The irony of the data is that even the business model of selling online only and not brick and mortar is not working except for Amazon.

We did over-expand, and a lot of elements caused a hardship, but Barneys was a very left-brain, right-brain company. People didn't understand that our merchants were really great business people, and when they bought the merchandise, not only did they have the highest markup, but also the least amount of markdowns. They bought it correctly and sold most of their merchandise at regular price. We bought things that didn't make money for years. Most stores would just drop them after one season.

Like what?

Like Armani. We didn't sell Armani well for three, four, five years. And then when the go-go eighties came, which was the whole Gordon Gekko thing, and Wall Street was on fire, we were selling them by the carloads. It was insane.

Today, luxury fashion is all about appealing to the very important clients (VICs). The aspirational shopper is less important for all kinds of reasons. What’s your take on this strategy? How does that compare to what was happening at Barneys in the seventies, eighties, and nineties?

Well, to put it simply, it's just stupid. I think fashion is so unaffordable and so over-priced. It's insulting. Ready-to-wear can be expensive — we sold a lot of expensive things — but it shouldn't be priced like couture. It’s not worth it. It's crazy. Customers are not stupid.

Besides, I don't know how good it is. It's like musical chairs of designers. They go from one line to the next. I don't know if that's good or not. I think they're missing out on younger talent that should be developed. But again, it's that safe thing. The big [department] stores are dead in the water for many reasons. It's just a real estate deal. The vendor bills the space [to brands]. And all these designer boutiques all look exactly the same in every store.

And the real scary thing for the retail industry is that Saks, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman are all owned by the same company [Saks Global]. They moved Saks into the Barneys space in Beverly Hills, which was my most beautiful store. The old Saks just got approval from Beverly Hills [to become a mixed-use complex including offices and residences]. So it's a real estate deal. That's why retailers always own their own real estate, because otherwise the rent would put them out of business.

Every day I feel like I’m reading a new story about the luxury industry in crisis. What's your assessment of what’s going on? How does it recover?

If I still owned Barneys, I believe it would be very relevant because I would've shrunk the ready-to-wear by at least 50 percent, because the market can't sustain that size of a store and make it special. The rest of it would be theatrical endeavors that would get people in the store. I would have maybe a 50,000-square-foot food hall. That would capture the imagination, because people really enjoy looking at and eating food. I would've probably opened an exclusive 1,000-square-foot theater for shows and concerts and events. Maybe I would've had art galleries.

That was the thing about Barneys I was most proud of. We constantly changed. I get bored real easy. So if I don't see new things all the time, then how is the customer going to react? Stores don't know how to do that. The asylum is run by the accountants.

I went to the Newhouse School [at Syracuse], I studied film. From ‘67 to ‘73 was some of the greatest filmmaking ever because they took risks and the companies that were financing them loved it.

There was that anger factor and that revolution factor. People were very hungry and inquisitive and wanted new things. Today, I'm not trying to be negative — trust me, I'm enjoying myself — but I do think that people need to get aggressive again and have passion.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Buy Gene’s book They All Came to Barneys.