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…