What Are We Missing When We Mourn Barneys?

When asked whether Ben-Avraham reached out during his campaign, Pressman had no comment. He said he was unmoved by @SaveBarneys. “If he was serious about putting in a bid, he would have put in $280 [million].” ABG bid slightly over $270 million. Ben-Avraham bid $260 million, hoping that the support of the store’s employees and petition would make up the difference. “I don’t need to beat [ABG], but I think I have a better proposal,” Ben-Avraham told GQ in October.

Pressman added, “Barneys has always been this shiny object, that for whatever reason, people think that if they bought it, they could co-opt it and it’ll automatically make them cool. And it didn’t.” (Pressman has an obsession with cool: in 2007, he wrote the book Chasing Cool, which outlines how corporations try to build cool products instead of building relevance that leads to the ephemeral concept.)

In contemporary New York, the @SaveBarneys campaign seemed to underscore, a fairytale nostalgia, that combines color palettes, ideas, and moods from previous generations, is now shorthand for cool. Many of the people mourning Barneys’ demise online are actually attending a funeral for something that died long ago—most of the images on the Instagram page were over 20 years old—but because of the nostalgia porn prevalent in everything from music to TV to fashion to Instagram in general, it’s easier than ever to find yourself missing something you never had, or maybe never even existed at all. Even ABG’s deal traffics in Barneys’ lost cool: as the press release states, “the initial focus will be on high-fashion collaborations, branded namesake products, and expanding international retail in both brick and mortar and eCommerce.”

But the decline of Barneys is also the latest story—and not the only one this week—about a capitalist who pushes the soul of an organization to the brink in pursuit of profit. (Financier Richard Perry was the most recent owner of Barneys, acquiring a controlling stake in 2012 that salvaged it from a possible bankruptcy filing under Dubai-based equity fund Istithmar World, which purchased the store from Jones Apparel Group in 2007.) Over the past decade, Barneys has changed hands four times, undergoing an almost relentless expansion and a loss of its specialty store identity as it sought to recoup its debt along the way. By the time Perry came on the scene, it was decidedly a department store, with a ground floor that then-New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn called “a sea of bags.”

It’s especially bad poetry that this happened the same week that the website Deadspin’s editorial staff staged a mass exodus after its new management handed down a wooden decree to “stick to sports,” and Dean & Deluca auctioned off the equipment and perishables from its shuttered Soho flagship. Barneys seems to be another chapter in the story of investors pushing exhaustively for revenue, even if it means the losing the identity that made a business a success in the first place.

To complain that capitalism brought down a luxury store may seem ridiculous. But with the overwhelming pro-sustainability message during the most recent slate of fashion weeks, and a quixotic statement that designers want us to want us less, the world of shopping has been tasked with addressing this delicate reality: how do you acknowledge that people want things, and designers and retailers want to sell them, without wanting too much?

As Pressman put it, “If I was one of the bidders, I would never make a promise to bring back Barneys to the way it was. I wouldn’t want to—I’d want to move into the future. The way it was was great, but it couldn’t survive.”

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