The Rise and Fall of the House of Barneys, The: A Family Tale of Chutzpah, Glory, and Greed FROM OUR EDITORS
The Rise and Fall of the House of Barneys
Dysfunctional families. Department-store shopping. Business management do's and don'ts. If you are interested in at least two of these three items, you will enjoy The Rise and Fall of the House of Barneys. If all three subjects appeal to you, then you will tear through this book like a package of peanut brittle, as I did. The story is a torrent of characters and events. It gushes along a chronological aqueduct, from 1923—when the doors opened at Barneys on Seventh Avenue and 17th Street in New York City, a legendary spot that would eventually become the world's most fabulous clothing store—until 1997, when those same hallowed doors closed for good.
First, Levine introduces us to Barney Pressman, the founder of Barneys, who was a squat (5' 3"), scrappy scavenger prone to screaming tirades after which all was forgiven. In the shaky early days, Barney was known to stock inventory from the closets of wealthy men whose obituaries he read in the newspaper. At the same time, Pressman stood for "unusual integrity in a shifty business." "Sure, you sold the man a lot of goods," he told a smug salesman, "but you didn't sell him the store. You didn't make him feel that this was the only place he could get that clothing and that kind of service.... You made a sale but you didn't make a customer."
After the war, Barney Pressman's son Fred started working at the store. Fred was an aesthete; he "could feel the weight of the fabric in grams," one supplier remembers. Fred despised his father's devotion to the common man, and lusted for the upscale, uptown crowd instead. Fred created boutiques: the English Room, the Oak Room, Chelsea Passage, the International House. There were father-son clashes, but business boomed. By the late 1980s, Barneys New York posted annual sales of $95 million—an unheard-of $560-per-square-foot of retail space.
With a candid account of Fred's sons Gene and Bob, who had joined the operation in the mid-'70s, Levine's book traces the turbulence that eventually led to the retailer's demise. Gene's specialty was spending money; Bob's was concealing expenditures. Of the two, Gene was the scum ball, punctuating his insults with farts and training the staff to ignore uncool customers. However, Gene was a talented scum ball. Under his direction, Barneys initiated its famously irreverent store windows and launched its women's department. But millions were being spent—on the mosaic floors from Munich, the staircases from Paris, the bloated salaries, the absurd perks—and too fast. A bailout partnership with a Japanese company, Isetan, provided temporary cash—enough to open 25 to 30 Barneys stores across the country. During the three months before the Madison Avenue Barneys store opened in 1993, $75 million was spent—$10 million in workers' overtime pay alone.
Soon after, Barneys filed for bankruptcy. And in May 1998, creditors assumed a 93.5 percent stake in the company. Will we hear from the Pressmans again? It wouldn't surprise me. The Rise and Fall of the House of Barneys proves that success is burned deep into their DNA. After all, shortly before his death in 1991 while well into his 90s, Barney Pressman still called the store from his retirement home in Florida for the numbers—collect.
—Sarah Finnie Cabot
Sarah Finnie Cabot is the president of KSV Interactive, a new-media company in Burlington, Vermont. She was previously the programming director of iVillage.com and the editorial promotion manager of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. She is working on a book about maternal instinct. Cabot lives in Vermont with her husband and their four school-age children.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
It took three generations to build Barneys into the world's most fabulous clothing store — and less than a decade to tear it down. This book is at once a family saga, a cautionary business tale, and a superbly detailed, behind-the-scenes account of how a secondhand store founded on pluck and chutzpah grew into a glittering international retail empire, only to founder on greed and hubris. Patriarch Barney Pressman started small in 1923, but within two decades he was selling more suits than anyone in the world. By the time his son, Fred, took over in the 1960s, Barneys was a thriving institution, and Boys Town at Barneys was the site of every New York boy's clothing rite of passage. But Fred had loftier ambitions; he was never comfortable with the crass discounter image. He staked the family fortune on European fabrics and design, wound up transforming the entire world of men's fashion, and made a killing along the way. But it was Fred's sons, Gene and Bob, who really wanted it all — not just a store but a grandiose temple of ultimate chic. Instead, through extravagance, flamboyance, greed, and an arrogant disregard for sound business principles, they raced heedlessly into one of the most spectacular business flameouts in retail history.
FROM THE CRITICS
Francine Prose - New York Observer
Reading The Rise and Fall of Barneys means wading through the details of the bad business decisions that brought the Pressmans low; some people love this sort of thing, which I find about as exciting as watching a stranger balance his checkbook.
Benjamin Svetkey - Entertainment Weekly
...[N]one had more potential for poetic justice and delicious comeuppance than that of the arrogant bozos in this little book. Certainly none were better dressed....Levine...delivers all the facts and figures....[W]ould make a magnificent HBO movie — a sort of Barbarians at the Gate outfitted in Armani.
Publishers Weekly
The once glittering image of Barneys takes a further drubbing in this dishy, highly entertaining history of the Pressman family store that got too big for its very expensive britches. Levine, a senior editor at Forbes, meticulously lays out the financial goods on the famed clothing store, which began in 1923 as a Chelsea storefront selling secondhand men's suits and, before filing for bankruptcy in 1996, set the standard for upscale retailing. The nuts-and-bolts business details are interesting in themselves: patriarch Barney Pressman started the business with $500 he got from hocking an engagement ring, and the empire ended with his grandson Bob's byzantine accounting manipulations masking $550 million in debt. On the human level, Levine makes clear how the flamboyant, warring personalities in the family (boisterous, stuttering Barney; cool and savvy son, Fred; and the wild boys of the third generation, brothers Gene and Bob) figured in the store's 70-year arc from rags up to the height of fashion and finally back down to financial tatters. The end of this archetypal story of family, money and betrayal was played out as a dynastic high drama that some have called the "Yiddish Theater Euripides." Levine lavishes his most loving attention on Barney Pressman, a blustery and wily self-promoter who reveled in billing himself as "the cut-rate clothing king." He shows no mercy toward Gene and Bob, who not only lost the family store but also, according to Levine, were more concerned with putting money into their pockets than into their business. With a sure command of both numbers and narrative, Levine fits his prose to his subject matter in fine, high style.
Library Journal
Forbes editor Levine chronicles the fortunes of Barneys, a firm built on the hard work of two generations and destroyed by the third. (Barneys filed for Chapter 11 in 1996 and emerged from bankruptcy just this February, having been bought by two companies, Whipoorwill Associates and Bay Harbor Management.) Barney Pressman began by selling used clothing and opened a store in Manhattan's Chelsea area in 1923. Barneys became noted for its ability to fit anyone. Barney's son, Fred, proved to have a talent for the business as well. Wives and children were all involved, and just about every new venture turned to gold. The third generation, Bob and Gene, expanded Barneys to other cities and built a second New York City store they felt would rival any in the world. No expense was spared in any of these ventures, which was perhaps the problem. Levine does a fine job of chronicling the business's rise and paints an informative picture of the industry over three generations. Recommended for public and university libraries and company libraries in the retail area. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/98.]--Littleton M. Maxwell, Business Information Ctr., Univ. of Richmond, VA
Jennifer Steinhauer - The New York Times Book Review
The book is at its best when it captures some of [the] excess....Confirm all your deeply held suspicions about the markup on the clothes and the disdain the help has often shown for its customers....So there are fewer Barneys stores now than there were a few years ago....This is not the stuff of tragedy. It's really just business.Read all 7 "From The Critics" >
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