During my childhood, in the 1950s, Philadelphia was a great department store town. It easily rivaled New York and Chicago in that regard, and the hierarchical progression of big emporiums along Market Street in Center City uncannily mapped their relative socioeconomic status. When I accompanied my mother on her monthly shopping excursions from our home across the river in gritty, blue-collar Camden, New Jersey, we’d begin our methodical east-to-west expedition at the most downscale department store of the lot, Lit Brothers, which occupied the north side of Market from 7th to 8th Streets. Although Lits was an old dump, architecturally it was fascinating: a block-long agglomeration of thirty-three Victorian commercial loft buildings internally conjoined and externally united by arched Italianate windows, a pair of matching corner turrets, and a battleship-gray paint job.
Catercorner on the south side of Market between 8th and 9th was the more upscale Gimbels, a branch of the New York–based middle-class retailer, housed in a stolid brownstone structure in the Richardsonian Romanesque mode. Both Lits and Gimbels were owned by Jewish families, whereas Philadelphia’s two top-tier department stores were established by Gentiles. This dichotomy was architecturally manifest at the intersection of 8th and Market, where to the north of Gimbels and to the west of Lits stood Strawbridge and Clothier. It specialized in preppy classics befitting its Waspy name and proclaimed social superiority through a 1931 limestone-clad building resembling a Park Avenue apartment house by Rosario Candela.
We never entered drab Snellenburg’s, at 11th Street, but then, at 13th and Market, adjacent to City Hall at the nexus of the urban grid, came the big payoff of our hours-long trek: the John Wanamaker Store. For me and many other residents of the region, this was the Buckingham Palace, the Louvre, the Vatican of shopping. Although my mother wouldn’t dream of buying Wanamaker’s top-dollar merchandise—“Too rich for my blood!” she’d exclaim, shocked by a price tag—we were nonetheless inexorably drawn by its free organ recitals, dazzling Christmas light show, and subliminal indoctrination in the joys of luxury acquisitiveness.
Completed in 1911 to the designs of the early Chicago skyscraper architect Daniel Burnham, this gray granite, twelve-story Renaissance Revival palazzo is organized around the soaring, 150-foot-high Grand Court. That covered atrium contains the enormous pipe organ Wanamaker bought at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, where he also acquired one of Philadelphia’s most beloved totems, the Eagle, a six-and-a-half-foot-tall bronze by the German sculptor August Gaul. For generations this was the city’s favorite rendezvous point—“Meet me at the Iggle,” as they’d say in the local dialect.
A consumer’s paradise that stocked everything from pianos and the latest Paris fashions to Persian carpets and Angora cats to bicycles and Bibles, this full-service bazaar was the brainchild of the pioneering merchant John Wanamaker. Although he is often deemed the father of the department store, that innovation actually began in Second Empire Paris, where Le Bon Marché, which offered an unprecedentedly broad range of goods under one roof, debuted in 1852, nine years before Wanamaker opened his first store in Philadelphia.
He believed that his enterprise was divinely guided, with an American fusion of Protestant piety (he refused to advertise on Sundays, a sacrifice at a time when weekend newspapers moved merchandise) and capitalist opportunism (he could be a ruthless competitor). That sacred-and-profane duality informs Nicole C. Kirk’s well-researched Wanamaker’s Temple: The Business of Religion in an Iconic Department Store. As she emphasizes, the perceived disparity between his publicly vaunted faith (he taught Sunday school and supported several evangelical Christian groups) and his openly partisan politics (he was US postmaster general under the Republican president Benjamin Harrison, whom he lavished with gifts, including a vacation house in Cape May, New Jersey, for Harrison’s wife, an offer Wanamaker was forced to rescind after it caused an uproar) prompted negative press coverage and stinging cartoons. Yet even his harshest critics could not deny that his series of ever-grander public emporiums, culminating with the splendid Burnham building, could also help to encourage, as Kirk writes (quoting an unnamed contemporary commentator),
“the general uplift of sentiment and the refining of all influences and ethics,” which would shape not only the store customers but business practices as well by the “harmonizing of discordant elements in a business whose moral tone should be commensurate with its artistic supremacy.”
Thus I felt an upswell of nostalgia this past March when The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the closing of that landmark, the last survivor among a once flourishing cohort. (Its new owners plan to convert it into loft apartments.) After Wanamaker’s went under in 1995, a succession of chain store tenants failed to revive the location. It was then taken over by Macy’s, which gave up because of declining sales and increasing theft. But the genuine grief experienced by many people when it shut down for good—evinced by last-minute visitors to “Wanny’s” who wept as if at a wake or a shiva—suggests that it was the building itself that meant the most to the citizenry and underscores the residual power of in-person commerce heightened by public spectacle. (This summer Opera Philadelphia announced that it will take over the Grand Court and its organ for public performances along with other local arts groups.)
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In 2021 the headline of a New York Post story by Lisa Fickenscher announced, “Barneys Heir Is Planning an Explosive Tell-All Book About the Luxury Retailer’s Demise.” The article was based on a proposal, then making the rounds of New York publishers, written by Bob Pressman, a grandson of Barney Pressman, the scrappy Lower East Side Jewish hondler who in 1923 started the business as a cut-rate men’s suit outlet. The founder’s son and Bob’s father, Fred Pressman, oversaw Barneys’ gradual ascendance from a pipe-rack business-suit specialist known for high volume and low prices to an upscale men’s fashion retailer and then to a prestigious luxury brand for both women and men. (The Pressmans changed the name of the business from Barney’s to Barneys New York in 1981.)
According to the Post, the incendiary prospectus portrayed the author as being “fed up with hiding the truth about his family.” It alleged that Fred Pressman “had a very long affair with a well-known Parisian lady,” and although his wife, Phyllis, “found out about the affair [she] never told Fred to avoid any interruption of her glamorous lifestyle or Fred’s cash flow continuing to flow to her.” It also said that the memoir would explain Barneys’ flameout bankruptcy and forced sale in the 1990s, as well as the acrimonious legal dispute that divided the couple’s four children. Bob Pressman, who handled the firm’s financials, and his older brother, Gene, who was in charge of merchandising, shared the title of CEO as the business unraveled. To further complicate matters, their wives also worked for the company. Finally, the two Pressman daughters, Elizabeth and Nancy, who held lesser positions in the organization and were minority shareholders, sued their brother Bob over asset distribution, and in 2002 a court awarded them $11.3 million.
That book has yet to be published. Instead the family narrative has been seized by Gene Pressman, whose new autobiography, They All Came to Barneys, follows other recent memoirs by his contemporaries. These include the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s surprisingly listless When the Going Was Good (I was a contributing editor under him at that magazine for two years in the 1990s, but we’ve never met) and the restaurateur Keith McNally’s I Regret Almost Everything—an unexpectedly poignant reminiscence of the long-lost time when those of us now in our seventies discovered the New York City of our dreams. But Pressman’s backward glance is cut from quite a different bolt of cloth.
They All Came to Barneys is essentially a nonfiction version of what book trade insiders used to call an S&F (shopping and fucking) title—the fiction genre perfected by Judith Krantz, whose best-selling novel Scruples (1978) set the template for trashy fiction with a prurient emphasis on copious sex coupled with frequent brand-name shout-outs of luxury consumer goods (books with lines like “He stroked her quivering thigh as they writhed on the 400-thread-count Porthault sheets”). Unlike Bob Pressman’s proposal, Gene’s book never tells us if Fred had a tootsie on the side. But as they would say in the rag trade, “So who didn’t?”
Perhaps to Oedipally overcompensate, the preening Pressman memorializes his own erotic adventures (as well as his erstwhile cocaine habit) in an orgy of boastful oversharing. Sometimes his accounts of yawn-inducing debauchery echo Borscht Belt shtick. When he was a teenager on a trip to Israel with his parents, his mother “asked me why I looked like shit (and felt like shit)…. I told her the truth: I’d been up all night screwing.” To which she replied, “Was she Jewish, at least?” Later he describes a spur-of-the-moment threesome with a jeans salesman and a demonstration model that he sandwiched into an already hectic denim trade show at Manhattan’s seedy McAlpin Hotel in the early 1970s:
The guy waving me in [to his room] looked like a hipster pirate…. [He] had a model on hand to try on jeans, a blond chick with a big smile. “She’s hot, isn’t she?” [he] said to me. She is, I agreed. “Why don’t the three of us go into the bathroom and smoke a joint?” he asked, with a glimmer in his eye.
We locked the door, and lit up a joint…. Things progressed from there. Me, the pirate I’d known for all of five minutes, and the jeans chick made what we used to call a scene, as the halls around us buzzed with browsing buyers.
The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt this is not, let alone Naked Lunch. But Pressman’s arrested adolescent urge to present himself as a swashbuckling rake might seem almost touching if he didn’t come across as so insufferably self-regarding. Among other quirks, his fixation on male gonads verges on the pathological. This book mentions balls more often than all of Austen, Thackeray, Trollope, and major league sports put together. He divulges that a European designer “called me Press Man, because, he told me many years later, of how tightly my Levi’s squeezed my balls.”
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However, far from disdaining the rise of the Pressmans, I fell under the spell of Barneys many times during my Condé Nast years, which began in 1979. The first really good suit I ever bought was a butter-soft black Giorgio Armani number from one of his early collections there. (The designer credits the store with having launched his international career.) I also sprang for their much-admired housewares—which were astutely selected by Fred’s wife, the formidable Phyllis Pressman—including an ochre faience dessert service by Creil, the venerable French pottery name-checked by Flaubert in L’Éducation sentimentale.
After such a testosterone-soaked recap of late-twentieth-century New York fashion retailing, one might gather that women were only peripheral in the industry, but two recent books counter that notion. Julie Satow’s lively When Women Ran Fifth Avenue reminds us that several of the city’s large department stores had female chief executives, most notably Dorothy Shaver, who in 1945 became president of Lord and Taylor—known for its sensible, conservative, high-quality apparel—and was the highest-paid businesswoman in the US, with an annual salary of $110,000 (around $2 million in current dollars).
Miss Shaver, as everyone called her—as formal and dignified as a Seven Sisters college president—served as the store’s head until her death at sixty-five in 1959. That same year Geraldine Stutz, the generation-younger head of the smaller, more fashionable Henri Bendel, introduced her much-imitated concept of the Street of Shops. This was a changing lineup of small, up-to-the-minute boutiques for young designers she took a chance on—among them Sonia Rykiel, Stephen Burrows, and Ralph Lauren—which increased traffic among curious trend seekers and altered the store’s image from chichi to go-go.
Nancy MacDonell’s Empresses of Seventh Avenue takes a wider view than the book’s title (which refers to the principal thoroughfare of Midtown Manhattan’s Garment District) might imply. It revisits the crucial period from the early to mid-1940s when French fashion houses were closed because of the Nazi occupation and New York clothing manufacturers were forced to decide on new directions by themselves rather than follow the top Paris couturiers who had set women’s styles since the mid-nineteenth century. In addition to such innovative designers as Claire McCardell and Bonnie Cashin—principal instigators of the free-and-easy modern sportswear look that emerged in response to women’s increasing emancipation—MacDonell surveys a broad range of influential figures who made American fashion a postwar international force. These included the archetypal fashion magazine editor Diana Vreeland, famed for her mad, oracular pronouncements and fever-vision photographic fantasies, and the fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert, who invented her profession as well as the International Best-Dressed List. Lambert, whose circle of friends was, in MacDonell’s words, “a Venn diagram of mid-twentieth-century celebrity,” knew everything about everyone but was both undeceived and understanding, which made her the most insightful raconteuse I’ve ever known.
Despite Gene Pressman’s superlative-choked assertion that “during the greatest, most exciting years in the world’s greatest, most exciting city, [Barneys] was the world’s greatest, most exciting store,” unbiased historians of modern retailing would accord that honor to Bloomingdale’s. Founded in 1872, this Upper East Side Manhattan department store plodded along for generations with a conventional mix of upper-middle-class staples. Then, in its second century, Bloomingdale’s suddenly morphed into a glamorous new kind of destination shopping experience, and during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s it became the epicenter of the so-called Saturday Generation of stylish New Yorkers. Flush with cash from their well-paid jobs, this army of conspicuous consumers—clad in safari looks, animal prints, Pucci scarves, and Gucci loafers—descended on “Bloomie’s” in droves to see and be seen while they browsed through the newest of the best of everything and spent, spent, spent.
There they would hang out for hours, sampling cosmetics, trying on sunglasses and shoes, running into friends, nibbling on quiche and sipping Chablis in Le Train Bleu (a replica of the dining car on the legendary Calais-to-Nice express), coveting furniture in the strikingly decorated model rooms, and rarely going home empty-handed. These young, affluent, often childless materialists made a day of it and turned recreational shopping into a weekend ritual that was equal parts acquisitive frenzy, exhibitionist passeggiata, and swinging singles pickup scene straight out of Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan magazine but also very gay. Even after they left the store, carrying around the readily identifiable Bloomingdale’s Big Brown Bag (designed in 1973 by the trendy graphic designers Lella and Massimo Vignelli) could spur a flirtation with a like-minded improper stranger.
The transformation of Bloomingdale’s was owed largely to Marvin Traub, the foremost retailing mastermind of his generation, who began working in its bargain basement in 1950 and rose to become president in 1969 and chairman and CEO nine years later. Traub was a visionary merchant whose combination of superb taste, social intuition, commercial sense, and impresarial flair put the Pressman clan into the shade, however skillfully and lucratively they did their own thing downtown during those years. He never underestimated New Yorkers’ eye for quality or willingness to pay for it, understood the competitive nature of fashion, and geared every decision to one end: making that sale. Because he lived in a manner his customers aspired to—Upper East Side apartment, Connecticut country house, frequent travel abroad, busy social life—he knew exactly what they needed and would go for, which he presented in ways that proved irresistible.
A populist showman par excellence, Traub was renowned for his spectacular storewide promotions. During a six-week limited run, these annual extravaganzas featured a panoply of special goods from a single foreign country diffused throughout the store’s various departments. Themes included “India: The Ultimate Fantasy” (1978), “Ireland: That Special Place” (1981), and “Fête de France” (1983). Each was inaugurated with a huge in-store black-tie dinner that drew a heady array of government dignitaries, showbiz celebrities, café socialites, Seventh Avenue schmatteurs, ad agency moguls, and complicit journalists to publicize it all.
In 1980, soon after I began working at Condé Nast, I was invited to the opening of “Come to China at Bloomingdale’s,” an event that seemed more like a diplomatic occasion than a clever sales stunt. When a high-ranking Chinese trade official in his opening remarks thanked “Chairman Traub,” he implicitly put the delighted host on a par with Chairman Mao. But Traub was already used to dealing with heads of state. In 1976, during her bicentennial visit to the US, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip spent an afternoon in the store at 59th and Lexington to promote British products. “She didn’t choose Saks, and she didn’t choose Bergdorf,” Traub exulted. “She chose Bloomingdale’s.”
Despite Gene Pressman’s insistence that Barneys was the ne plus ultra of hip-and-happening New York fashion marketing, his deep-seated jealousy of Traub’s success bubbles up. He lived in a postwar seventh-floor apartment on East 61st Street, which, he writes, had
a direct sightline into Bloomingdale’s from the bathroom. I used to fantasize every time I took a leak that I was pissing down onto it. Honestly, I was envious…. I would spend weekends there, roaming the racks, checking out the girls, seething that they still had cooler stuff than Barneys, and women who wanted to shop it.
The Pressman family saga follows the classic three-generation Buddenbrooks rise-and-fall scenario, with the shrewd, industrious founder (Barney), the dutiful, diligent consolidator (Fred), and the heedless, overreaching inheritors (Gene and Bob). Although the clan appeared congenitally able to turn big profits, its younger members longed to transcend the business’s grubby downtown origins. They labored for decades to make Barneys the city’s premier menswear store, an ambition attainable in part because their unfashionable location at Seventh Avenue and 17th Street was much closer to Wall Street’s deep-pocketed masters of the universe than their midtown rivals: the Ivy League traditionalist Brooks Brothers and the much smaller J. Press and Paul Stuart.
Having accomplished that goal by the store’s fiftieth anniversary in 1973 and eager for Barney’s to acquire the cachet of uptown carriage-trade establishments like Saks Fifth Avenue, Bonwit Teller, Henri Bendel, and especially Bergdorf Goodman—“Berger King,” as Gene witlessly dubs it—the family decided to branch out into what he calls, in garment-speak, “women’s” tout court. It wasn’t an easy fit at first. Much of the women’s apparel that Barney’s began selling in 1976 was made by menswear manufacturers the Pressmans already did business with, since more desirable big-name labels already had exclusive agreements with other New York stores.
Compelled to find uncommitted talent, the Pressmans came up with an impressive roster of gifted newcomers who burnished their “fashion-forward” image far better than the predictable Paris designers whose lines were monopolized by uptown retailers. Barneys signed future stars such as Armani, Gianni Versace, Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Gene’s favorite, Azzedine Alaïa, a Tunisian-born Parisian whose sexy, body-conscious outfits in clingy stretch fabrics attracted a new generation of gym-toned women. They sold so well that in 1986 Barneys was able to open a separate women’s store down the block from the original.
But that still wasn’t enough, and the family, more determined than ever to join Manhattan’s mercantile elite, decided in 1990 to acquire a nine-story building at 61st Street and Madison Avenue, almost equidistant between the “Three B’s”—Bendel’s, Bergdorf’s, and Bloomingdale’s, its prime competitors. Although the big holding companies that control most American retailing chains—led by the all-mighty Federated Department Stores (now known as Macy’s, Inc.), parent company of Bloomingdale’s—had ample resources to fund corporate growth, the family-owned Barneys, successful though it was, needed outside investors to expand. It cost $100 million to buy 660 Madison and renovate it to the Pressmans’ exacting specifications, epitomized by the building’s French limestone cladding. Such expensive upgrades, emblematic of the firm’s chronic cost overruns and lax management, were soon to have catastrophic consequences.
To finance their grandiose plans—there would be a total of twenty-two Barneys locations, with lavish “flagships” in Beverly Hills, Chicago, and Tokyo—the Pressmans in 1989 formed a holding company with the Japanese department store group Isetan, which wound up sinking more than $616 million into the partnership. This new infusion of capital bankrolled a woefully ill-timed growth spurt that coincided with the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy in the early 1990s, a recession in this country, and Fred Pressman’s death from pancreatic cancer in 1996, six months after Barneys New York was forced to file for bankruptcy.
At this point Gene Pressman alludes to the Greek myth of Icarus: “We had shot the moon, and ended up flying too close to the sun.” Yet he neither names the unfortunate aeronaut nor seems to comprehend that he brought his destruction upon himself. Five pages before the end of his relentlessly self-serving text, he at last concedes, “We had shown hubris.” I was surprised he knew the word. (In the book’s acknowledgments he thanks “my coauthor-in-crime and good friend Matthew,” who was identified by Women’s Wear Daily as Matthew Schneier, a writer for New York magazine.)
According to Jennet Conant’s devastating 1996 Vanity Fair article “Bringing Down Barneys,” family friends have concurred that Fred and Phyllis Pressman favored Gene among their children and habitually overindulged him. As his memoir makes clear, an almost sociopathic arrogance turned out to be the princeling’s fatal flaw. He quotes a former employee’s admission that “we didn’t really care if you wanted to shop with us…. You either were a customer or you weren’t.” She recalls being introduced to people who would expostulate, “Barneys? I can’t find anything in that store. Everything’s small and everything’s black,” to which she would coolly reply, “You know what, maybe it’s not the store for you. Maybe you’ll do better at Saks.” To which Pressman adds, “I love that woman.”
Barneys’ management had such overconfidence in its fiercely loyal customer base that it thought the business was impregnable. But that loyalty was actually quite thin. Traub, who successfully raised the bar to boost his bottom line, fostered an improbable sense of community among Bloomingdale’s regulars, whose Saturday shopping sprees were a veritable tribal gathering. Late-phase Barneys made a disproportionate amount of its money from esoteric, outrageously marked-up items geared to a tiny audience and became a snooty sorority for size twos. Could there be a worse business model for vast expansion than the one imagined by the third generation of Pressmans?
All of this occurred nearly three decades ago, well before the widespread adoption of e-commerce, which has completely upended the retail economy and hastened the twilight of the department store. A growing concern of mass-market merchants in recent years has been to find new ways of recapturing the commercial sorcery that Wanamaker, Traub, and the Pressmans in their heyday conjured to draw people out of their homes and into their stores. In a bold attempt to reinvent American in-person shopping at the highest price point, this spring the Paris-based department store Printemps—which is owned by a Qatari royal family investment fund—unveiled Printemps New York, which its publicists stress is a specialty shop, because it offers a more focused range of categories than a department store.
It is housed in a structure no less spectacular than the luxury retailer’s home base, a Belle Époque showplace on the boulevard Haussmann. Printemps New York occupies the first two floors of 1 Wall Street—originally known as the Irving Trust Company Building, Ralph Walker’s glorious Art Deco skyscraper of 1929–1931. (The rest of the structure has been converted into condominiums.) The French retailer’s new American outpost is a selfie-ready indoor playground for affluent young show-offs and their Instagram followers. This fusion of old-school ostentation and up-to-the-nanosecond maximalism seems primarily calculated to read well on electronic screens, where subtlety is lost, restraint becomes nothingness, and simplicity induces swipes.
The work of the Paris-based interior designer Laura Gonzalez, Printemps New York is immersed in saturated colors, busy patterns, and shiny layered finishes. Although it’s difficult to assign any one stylistic label to it, the closest analogy might be the over-the-top MGM musicals directed by Vincente Minnelli right after World War II, with their bizarre mash-up of commercialized Surrealism, plush overabundance, and Folies Bergère glitter.
For example, on the store’s second floor, one would not be surprised if a trio of circular display gazebos—crafted from white-painted wrought iron to mimic interlocking calla lilies—began to rotate while beplumed showgirls emerged from within. Nearby a sextet of pink blown-glass chandeliers in the form of large Christmas trees hovers over a selection of staid menswear, a multiple non sequitur that segues into a long, undulating, glaringly lit white corridor where cosmetics are sold but that reminded me of the space station in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. These startling fantasias lead visitors through the store in a sequence that has no more continuity or logic than one’s dreams after a very spicy meal.
Speaking of food, Printemps New York revives the time-honored department store strategy of getting customers to linger and spend more by offering five places to have a meal, a snack, a drink, or coffee. These restaurants, cafés, and bars, like the entire operation, are staffed by the most charming, solicitous, and plentiful cohort of employees one has ever encountered in a retail setting. Only the cynical might suspect that their omnipresence is as much a security measure as a customer-oriented grace note in a period rife with what the National Retail Federation calls ORC—organized retail crime.
The grandest space at 1 Wall Street is now the main entrance of Printemps New York: the Red Room, which originally served as the Irving Trust Company’s ground-floor banking hall. This majestic thirty-three-foot-high chamber takes its name from the stunning oxblood-red-and-gold mosaics that cover its faceted walls and ceiling in a veined Expressionist pattern. These were completed by the Queens-born decorative artist Hildreth Meière in 1931 and were granted official landmark status last year, which means that they cannot be altered without a permit. But however magnificent this miraculously surviving interior may be, it’s obvious that Gonzalez has done everything possible to prevent anyone from seeing it.
The Red Room is now forested with a slew of tall white freestanding stanchions topped by gigantic white filigree butterfly wings, the first of many perverse metamorphoses of natural motifs that recur throughout the store. These superscale lepidoptera hover above towering biomorphic étagères that act as virtual shrines to deluxe women’s footwear, a fetishist’s fiesta of slingbacks, sandals, slip-ons, and stilettos. To be sure, bad taste can be great fun, both for those who love it and for those of us who love to hate it. Perhaps Gonzalez was trying to follow Sergei Diaghilev’s famous exhortation to his Ballets Russes décoriste Jean Cocteau: “Étonne-moi!” (Astonish me!) But to play on the title of that impresario’s most controversial production, her redo of the Red Room is Le Sacrilège du Printemps. Whether or not in-person shopping can be revivified by such theatrics is impossible to predict, but one does suspect that the shades of John Wanamaker, Marvin Traub, and Fred Pressman would be highly bemused.
