The new Barneys book is a dumb dark American tragicomedy
Money, art, and the urge toward endless expansion
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One of the best books ever written about art, money and Hollywood is Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye (2020). It chronicles the making of Roman Polanski’s 1974 neo-noir masterpiece, Chinatown, and eulogizes a fascinating moment in mass entertainment, virtually unimaginable today, when a risk-hungry studio boss like Robert Evans could let a gang of brilliant young auteurs cook, blessing them with extravagant creative freedom and budgets to match. These auteurs included Polanski, Francis Ford Coppola, Hal Ashby, and Sidney Lumet, and the films they made for Evans at Paramount included Chinatown, The Godfather and The Godfather II. What I love about Wasson’s book is how deftly it captures the tensions, resentments, strange industry climate, bold visions, creative missteps, bruised egos, power plays, betrayals, beady-eyed accounting push-backs, and transcendent breakthroughs that combined to produce these classics.
The right person could write a similarly excellent book about Barneys, the legendary New York clothing store. Barneys opened on Seventh Avenue in 1923, founded by a schmatta man named Barney Pressman, who made a fortune selling discount men’s suits. Over time, Barney ceded control to his son, Fred, who, with Barney’s grandsons, Gene and Robert, transformed the store into an upmarket NYC powerhouse — and, what’s more, into a cool one.
Barneys went supernova in the 1980s. They raked in money from cash-flush Wall Street types, then spent it lavishly on over-the-top build-outs with buzzy architects; on cheeky window displays and ads (courtesy of the young Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Simon Doonan, Fabien Baron, Glenn O’Brien, and others); and, most importantly, on clothes designed by gifted visionaries like Rei Kawakubo, Jil Sander, Yohji Yamamoto, Giorgio Armani, Miuccia Prada, Helmut Lang, Hussein Chalayan, Dries Van Noten, and Martin Margiela.
These designers made Barneys big not only with yuppies gorging on the demon fruit of Reagan-era financial deregulation, but with artists and other downtown cultural fixtures. This helped the store to market itself as being “about” something besides pure commerce, in much the same way that Robert Evans’s Paramount was a studio “about” something besides pure box-office math.
That’s how Gene Pressman frames it in his bestselling new “personal history” of the store, They All Came to Barneys, whose cover you’ve likely seen someone post to Instagram stories over the past few weeks. Gene was the eldest and more extroverted of his siblings. After a pampered youth spent, by his own account, f--king models, doing drugs, and failing to make it as a filmmaker after not trying very hard, he went into the family business — while, he emphasizes, continuing to have mad sex with models and do mad drugs. In the mid ‘90s, Gene and Robert, by that point co-CEOs, led the store into hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, and Barneys filed for bankruptcy protection. Soon, Barney Pressman’s descendants were effectively forced out of the store.
Gene casts himself as a last-of-a-dying-breed, Robert Evans-style figure: a playboy money man, dripped out in houndstooth Hermès sport coats and stonewashed jeans, his loafers planted firmly on the Business side of things, yet guided by what he describes as his own intrinsically artistic spirit.
The bad news for us? Pressman spent most of his life working as a monument erector, and with this book he essentially set out to erect a monument to his family’s shop — “my business, my birthright,” as he puts it. But he isn’t up to the task. They All Came to Barneys isn’t pure hagiography, but an actual writer, with Wasson-like skills for reporting, a Coppola-like freedom to cook, and no stake in varnishing Barneys’ legacy, could have made something so much deeper, and so much more alive. When you’re an owner, like Pressman, you can pay a phalanx of talented people for their work, hide your own shortcomings, and launder them as “business prowess.” When you’re a writer, though, no such hiding is possible. Even if you hire a co-author, as Pressman did, it’s ultimately just you on the page, laid bare for everyone to see.
The good news? Pressman’s history of Barneys is revealing all the same, even if that’s largely inadvertent. It’s a book about the tug of war between the zombie prerogatives of money and the unbound prerogatives of art. And its narrator is a cocksure agent of capital who thought he could mold himself into an Artist of Selling — until capital, and his own greed, got the better of him, and destroyed what his dad and grandfather created.
The main problem with the book is that Gene Pressman is a tedious narrator of his own patently interesting life. His co-author, Matthew Schneier, is a good writer, who helps keep the pacing fleet. I’d love to read his Barneys book. But here, he can’t save Pressman from a deadly tendency toward clichés. Gene tells us he’s an “all gas, no brakes” type of guy. “I always thought big,” he writes. “The sky wasn’t limit enough.” At Barneys, it sometimes felt like “the inmates were running the asylum,” and yet, “when it all worked, the machine hummed.” When the Pressmans found themselves in “uncharted waters,” they had to “steady the ship.” And so on. Pressman insists on his tireless dedication to stocking nothing but “the best” at Barneys, but when it comes to turns of phrase, he’s fine using the cheap generic stuff.
Pressman’s dependence on shopworn language connects to a deeper issue, which reveals itself over the course of the book: his profound incapacity for introspection. It’s impossible not to compare this book with the surly British restaurateur Keith McNally’s wonderful memoir from earlier this year, I Regret Almost Everything. Both authors are bullishly ambitious multimillionaire businessmen. Both proved adept at assembling teams to build costly, complex, enchanting demimondes that helped define a bygone downtown New York. Both men are clearly, and I mean this as objectively as possible, enormous a--holes.
But McNally has wit, stories, unexpected opinions and, crucially, deep inner conflict — a compelling mixture of arrogance and self-loathing that he grapples with on the page. As a narrator, Pressman has the arrogance, and not much of the rest.
There are flashes of blunt, vivid language. There are moments of self-deprecation, too, though mostly of a pro forma kind. Reading this book can feel like you’ve been trapped opposite a guy giving his own wedding toast, tossing a few jabs his own way, but generally drawing himself a long, room-temperature bath of self-congratulation.
One review called this book “dishy.” There is s--t-talking and sex, but when Pressman leaves the rote rhetorical territory of The Toast, it’s often for the rote rhetorical territory of The Locker Room. He repeatedly reminds us that, while many men who work in fashion are gay, he is a straight heterosexual who is attracted to women, in particular beautiful knockouts who are very hot, and that he began an impressive campaign of smashing dimes at a young age.
That could, of course, be immensely fun to read about. But for a hedonist, there’s a weirdly anhedonic quality to Pressman’s descriptions of debauchery. He’s a vain Stickman in Winter, recounting past excesses and conquests like he’s inventorying the contents of his wine cellar. You get the idea that the 1981 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti was expensive, but there isn’t much sense of what it tasted like.
This is a bummer, because it leaves some great material on the table. Reading old profiles of Pressman, like a 1993 New York Times Magazine story, you come across lively personal quirks, alongside more bracing traits. He liked to have his shirts monogrammed, but on the inside, where only he could see. He engaged in “tirades” that could “reduce subordinates to tears.” In that same piece, after Ralph Lauren stops selling his clothes to Barneys, Gene takes a shot at the Polo God: “Our notion of classic isn’t to bottle the WASP ethic and throw every English thing you can lay your hands on into the store,” he tells the reporter. “You know who I mean, don’t you?”
Spicy! But none of that is in this book.
There are other fascinating things about the Pressmans you don’t find here. They were apparently brutal negotiators, capable of hammering vendors for exclusives and other advantageous terms. “The Pressmans are renowned for bullying suppliers,” a reporter wrote in Vanity Fair in 1996. Gene tells us that he fought for competitive edge, but gives us zero grain of what that looked like. There are no tense play-by-plays of luxury-retail-war maneuverings, no high-stakes boardroom cat-and-mouse showdowns. Just one broad stroke after another. In the Vanity Fair feature, we also learn about Barneys’ reputation among several designers for late payments, which can of course be devastating to a small line. Pressman acknowledges some unpaid invoices with a note of contrition, but ultimately waves them away as a regrettable standard industry practice.
That feature, written after the Barneys bankruptcy filing, also describes a ferocious rivalry between Gene, “the family star,” and Robert, his “socially awkward and somewhat brooding” brother. When New York planned to put Gene on its cover solo, the reporter notes, “Bob threw such a tantrum that at the last minute the magazine mechanically inserted him into the cover photograph.” She writes that “there are those who see the brothers’ mutual loathing as the bonfire burning beneath the company’s current financial predicament. A family friend confides the story of Bob’s wife, Holly, calling her in-laws ‘the most dysfunctional family I’ve ever seen’ after an argument several years ago that left Gene and Bob barely speaking.”
Several years ago, Pressman sisters Elizabeth and Nancy sued Robert, “accusing him of cheating them out of $30 million from the business,” as the New York Post recently put it. In July, 2024, Robert, 71, sued his siblings in turn, along with his late mother’s estate, accusing them “of orchestrating an elaborate tax fraud scheme that allegedly cheated New York state out of $20 million.”
This has the makings of some truly biblical, Cain & Abel s--t. Maybe it’s there in the tell-all memoir Robert Pressman has reportedly been shopping, or in Joshua Levine’s 1999 Rise and Fall of the House of Barneys, which I’m eager to read. But Gene, who dismisses the Vanity Fair story as a “hit piece,” only describes a personality mismatch between the brothers, mentions a lock that Robert pointedly installed on his side of their shared office door, and goes no further.
It’s understandable why he doesn’t want to get into painful details. But if you’re selling readers a personal history of Barneys, you can’t be so pained by personal details that are such an enormous part of the story that you leave them out entirely. In their absence, Pressman’s book can’t help but seem slight, evasive, watered-down.
Except, that is, until its final pages, when a tragic motif underlying the whole book finally snaps into focus.
Pressman emerged from his 1960s youth with a love for the energy and aesthetics of rebellion. He tooled around Syracuse University with “STRIKE” signs festooning his Jaguar and, he writes, always liked to wear his hair long, despite his mother’s disapproval.
He was, by his own telling, a failed artist. After college he abandoned his adolescent dreams of becoming a musician and moved to L.A. intent on becoming a filmmaker. He dropped that dream “within a few weeks” of thankless gofer work, when he realized it was going to be difficult.
Instead, he went back home and joined Barneys. There, he could do some perfunctory gofering in the warehouse, commuting from Barney Pressman’s Park Avenue apartment in a chauffeured Cadillac, before he was airlifted to a more glamorous role as a buyer.
And it was at Barneys, in Gene’s telling, that he finally found success as an artist after all. Métier No. 1, he explains, was Making Money. “Who needed movies?” he writes. “Life was a movie, and commerce could be an art form all its own.” He quotes the arch, ironic Andy Warhol without any seeming archness or irony: “‘Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art.’ Who was I to disagree?”
Métier no. 2 was merchandising, which Pressman characterizes as exalted and ineffable, not simply a trade. “Everyone merchandises,” he insists. “When something is arranged perfectly, the seams never showing, the flow impeccable — that’s merchandised. The second side of Abbey Road: merchandised to a tee. A great novel, a Rabbit, Run or Portnoy’s Complaint: merchandised, too.”
“Novelists merchandise words” is such a perfect, dumb Delusional Rich Guy way of seeing the world that, the more time I spent with Pressman’s book, the more I came to see him as an obliviously tragicomic figure of the kind Danny McBride might have fun playing.
Pressman clearly had great success identifying talent. In the Village Voice in the late ‘90s, Lynn Yaeger saluted Barneys for carrying “the most imaginative clothes in the world.” Talking to the Times Magazine, Simon Doonan said, “Gene’s strength is gut-level responses. He’s a great yardstick for whether things — a window, an ad, a look — are communicating.”
But, as much as he believes otherwise, Pressman was never himself an artist, because it’s clear he never found anything to believe in besides his own appetites.
A real artist digs inward, even if their vision simultaneously spreads outward to command ever-larger canvases. There was no such dual motion with Pressman, though, just the one unrelenting drive toward expansion, scale, domination. In one vibrant passage, he remembers looking down at Bloomingdale’s, the competition, from his bathroom window, and fantasizing that he’s pissing on the store. He was so monomaniacal in his focus on Barneys that even when his first wife, Bonnie, was diagnosed with breast cancer and began treatment, he writes, “I could barely pay attention.” Early on, Pressman characterizes himself as “hungry and horny,” and when it comes to understanding him psychologically, things seem pretty much to have been that simple.
And yet. At the end of the book, Pressman draws a sharp line distinguishing himself from the mere “bean counters” who would take control of Barneys. And here we return to the figure of Paramount’s Robert Evans, because what Pressman did have in common with Evans was his gusto for big swings, for gambles, for risk.
Pressman was able to spot and support great designers like Kawakubo because he understood the market appeal of bold, uncompromising creative choices. He was not some arcane sophisticate. As he puts it, “I liked anything with a little ‘f--k you’ to it,” and he knew there was a moneyed customer who felt the same way. Unlike some fearful number-cruncher, focused only on the bottom line, when Pressman found something with that f--k you energy, he was willing to throw money at it.
The tragedy of Barneys, as he tells it, is that the bean counters won. They buffed away all the boldness and idiosyncrasy that Fred Pressman taught Gene to value, expounding on the virtues of fine English last-making and Como silk mills. Gene updated his father’s love of well-made clothes for his own era, turning Barneys’ house style into what Donna Karan described as “artsy, downtown. It’s a very strong point of view. It’s not for everybody.”
“Not for everybody,” to be absolutely clear, can still generate a ton of money. The New York Times reported that, in the early ‘90s, the downtown Barneys was pulling in “impressive sales of $650 a square foot,” which was “well above the national average for specialty stores” and yet, “below Saks, Bloomingdale’s and Bergdorf’s New York sales.”
Barneys’ financial undoing started there, as Gene and Robert launched a major expansion plan, opening Barneys outposts in malls nationwide, and building a $100 million uptown flagship, catalyzing the gargantuan debt that would prove their undoing.
This is the real tragedy and comedy here, as I see it: that robust sales, and a personal fortune reportedly in the neighborhood of $50 million, was never going to be enough for someone like Gene Pressman. Instead of contenting himself to do a smallish, special thing well, he chased growth for the sake of growth — and seems incapable of having done otherwise.
That drive toward total domination, that undead urge for endless expansion, tends to lead to two places. It can make you monstrous. It can turn you into a joke. Often, it does both.
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This is such a good review, in part because it seems you so wanted to like the book and gave it every opportunity. For a much more satisfying story from a department store executive, I really enjoyed Lauren Sherman’s recent conversation with Peter Nordstrom on her podcast.
The “merchant princes” are such boring menaces.