THEY ALL CAME TO BARNEYS

A life in retail, a cultural history of New York, and a settling of scores.

The grandson of Barney Pressman, founder of Barneys, gives a detailed account of the family business, and of his participation in it. Thanks to the successes of his grandparents and his parents, Fred and Phyllis Pressman, Gene and his siblings were born with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths and were also indoctrinated early into the family work ethic, also known as the “the Pressman way”: “We dreamed it, we made it, and then we exceeded it.” Early chapters document the high life of the young, reckless, and mod in the 1960s and ’70s; Pressman was quite the ladies’ man, and the reader will need to weather many observations along the lines of “I’d worked my way through the Sports Illustrated girls of northern Europe” (on the other hand, no matter what you’ve heard about Plato’s Retreat, it was “disgusting”). Pressman and his collaborator, Matthew Schneier, do excellent work in capturing the economic and cultural trends of the last four decades of the 20th century and in delivering detailed portraits of important players and movements in fashion during this period, from Giorgio Armani to Azzedine Alaïa, from Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons to Ralph Lauren, the latter depicted as both a brilliant businessman and “a finicky pain in the ass.” Most of the detail that makes this book a bit long is worth hearing, though occasionally one wonders about the wisdom of, say, listing every designer collection that appeared on the fourth floor in 1986. The illustrations and photographs are well chosen. As for the series of mistakes that led to bankruptcy and the decline of the brand, the pace of growth gets so frantic, the level of excess and ornament so extreme, and the finances so leveraged that one almost hears echoes of the Roman Empire and the Court of the Sun King resonating up and down “the iconic art deco spiral staircase at Barneys’ Seventeenth Street women’s store.”

This glittering, dishy time capsule of a paradise lost is as charming and blustery as its author.