THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HOUSE OF BARNEYS

To New Yorkers, this is a local story, focused on one of the largest retail clothing stores in Manhattan. To most of the rest of the country, however, Barneys may be an unfamiliar name and the draw for this title may come mostly as a morality tale of abused family fortunes. Three generations of the Pressman family star in this business chronology. Barney Pressman, the founder, began peddling secondhand suits in 1923 in a 500-square-foot storefront, the startup money raised by pawning his wife’s wedding ring. Hard work and a talent for sales propelled his modest venture into a thriving retail enterprise by the time Barney’s son Fred joined the business in 1947, fresh out of Harvard law school. Fred Pressman learned the basics of menswear manufacturing and retailing while on the job, but diverged from his father’s path to establish novel methods of marketing and merchandising. Barneys became a mecca for quality, selection, and price, usually trumping all other menswear outlets in the city. On Fred’s heels came the third generation, two sons raised in an upper-income environment and lured into the family business by the sharing of its wealth and power. In the 1980s and early 1990s, they took over the business and pushed it to an even higher level of sophistication. But in a very few years, all of this history came unglued as their talents were outrun by their rush to expand and their inability to manage their own affairs. Barneys was forced into bankruptcy in 1996, “done in by debt and disorder.” No complex business studies are needed to make sense of this disaster; the deeds of the grandsons speak for themselves. The author, a senior editor at Forbes, did not have the cooperation of the Pressman family, perhaps limiting his scope but not diminishing the impact of the mess they left behind. (16 b&w photos, not seen)a