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Originally posted by Tiffany7@Nov 18 2004, 06:54 AM
Does anyone know if they will be having their Marc Jacobs bags on sale & how much the discount will be? Im not talking about the Stella or any of the regular bags that seem to be out every year... Im not interested in them.
Thanks.
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i love those bags, do u have photos of the ones u want?
there are some mj bgs on sale now...Originally posted by Tiffany7@Nov 17 2004, 03:54 PM
Does anyone know if they will be having their Marc Jacobs bags on sale & how much the discount will be? Im not talking about the Stella or any of the regular bags that seem to be out every year... Im not interested in them.
Thanks.
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Originally posted by faust@Nov 15 2004, 05:30 PM
So what's the rationalle behind such early sales? Is it because that everybody who wanted to buy the coveted items bought them and the rest can't justify such high prices? (remember, the prices went up 6% last season, and 20% this season, that's 26%
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Originally posted by softgrey@Nov 18 2004, 01:04 AM
there are some mj bgs on sale now...
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it was the ny store on madison and just one or two styles..maybe they sold out...sorry...Originally posted by Tiffany7@Nov 18 2004, 05:35 PM
Which Barneys are you talking about? I just called one in NY & they said they werent on sale & they wouldnt be until late December.
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I think it is when the new collection is coming (is that spring because they have like pre fall? or is it when fall comes in?)
nymag.comBarneys’ Fall Line
The reinvention of a New York store.
- By Amy Larocca
- Published Aug 14, 2011
Barneys' new team, from left: Simon Doonan, Charlotte Blechman, Amanda Brooks, Dennis Freedman, Mark Lee, Daniella Vitale, Tom Kalenderian. (Photo: Jason Schmidt)
The ground floor at Barneys on Madison Avenue has always been a magical, twinkling place. It is reached via a great big door that revolves with a seemingly limitless flow of glossy hair and glossy skin and glossy nails and very expensive leather in the form of handbags and shoes.
Everywhere there are antique vitrines filled with striped Japanese socks, or gumball-size rubies direct from Jaipur, or watches from Hermès, or stacks of cashmere shawls so fine they could fit through any number of the diamond pavé rings that are displayed on either side of the door. There are vintage rose-gold earrings from Spain and there are elegant briefcases from a family-owned company in Milan.
It’s one of the places people go to celebrate something New York and big, like a promotion or an opening on Broadway or the closing of a major deal. It is also a place people go when they are rich enough not to need a special occasion to celebrate, or when they want to treat themselves to a pair of shoes (on sale or not)—or simply to a chopped chicken salad at Fred’s, the restaurant on the ninth floor where the patrons enact a version of New York life that is usually restricted to romantic comedies. As Sarah Jessica Parker once said: “If you’re a nice person and you work hard, you get to go shopping at Barneys.”
But like many of its clients, Barneys—founded by Barney Pressman in 1923—has had its ups, its downs, and its great many in-betweens, and it is, at right this very moment, engaged in that most New York of pursuits: a reinvention.
In 2007, the entire Barneys chain—six Barneys stores in the U.S., plus fifteen Barneys *Co-Ops, which target a younger client with a smaller budget—was bought by Dubai’s *Istithmar World for $942 million, including around $500 million in long-term debt. In 2008, Barneys CEO Howard Socol resigned, and the whole operation trundled along for several years without anyone in the top job.
But then, last summer, Mark Lee was hired as Barneys’ new CEO. Lee is a slim man with a trim haircut and a wardrobe of very well-made suits. His reputation is as golden as it gets in the fashion world: He’s spent his career in Europe occupying high-level positions at important fashion houses—*Armani, Yves Saint Laurent, and, most recently, Gucci, where revenues went up 46 percent during his three and a half years as CEO. Lee is very much a businessman, but he’s the kind of businessman with taste: He was an early proponent of Stefano Pilati, now chief designer at YSL, for example. As Simon Doonan, who has worked at Barneys for 25 years as everything from spokesman to window dresser to general creative mastermind, puts it, “Mark Lee is very modern. He’s a very forward-thinking dude.”
Lee resigned from Gucci in 2008 and was enjoying a sort of quasi-retirement back in New York comprising Pilates, home renovation, and corporate boards (Tory Burch, Yoox). His longtime partner, Ed Filipowski, who is the co-president of the fashion-PR juggernaut KCD, lives here, and so do the couple’s two beagles. Lee, quite simply, wanted to come home. “I don’t mean to sound terrible,” he says, “but I’d worked for all of these great European brands, and there just weren’t American brands that I felt excited about.” But Barneys had always been on his list of dream jobs. He was offered a position there 25 years ago by Gene Pressman, grandson of the store’s namesake. That offer was made on a Friday, and when Lee asked for the weekend to think it over, it was rescinded. “Gene thought that if I was passionate about it, I would have accepted on the spot,” Lee says over lunch one day at Fred’s (named for Fred Pressman, Gene’s father). He slices his chicken Milanese into neat little bites. “So I suppose this is what Oprah would call a full-circle moment.”
A lot has changed since that long-ago offer. In these crazy economic times, the very highest end of things has remained very much up, particularly in places like China, but with global expansion has come a dilution of what luxury used to mean. Even at home, among all the Real Housewives, a name brand and a big price tag are no longer enough to qualify an item as exclusive. And now there’s the economy’s latest churn. “The 24-hour news cycle tends to play on the psyche of the customer,” Lee said last week. “It’s important we stay fine-tuned to the situation. We are always competing. Luxury customers are still shopping, but they are very thoughtful about purchases.” And presumably, they want something that the Jill Zarins of the world haven’t got. For Lee, this is the key to the success of the new Barneys. “The bigger luxury brands get,” he says, “the more that gives meaning to Barneys.” In order to attract the kind of customer Barneys is after, the kind of customer who helped make the store the cultural fetish that it is, Barneys has to concoct a universe in which expensive product is even more special, unique, worth it.
NEW
Daphne Guinness in the window this past May. (Photo: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for Barneys New York)
Freedman is also overseeing the store’s renovation: Where Doonan once decorated the dressing rooms of the Co-Op with a multicolored arrangement of Tic Tacs, Freedman is streamlining everything with high-end finishes and mega-technology. Even his stunts are sleeker, the sort of elaborate projects that might have once appeared in the pages of W.
His very first window installation, this spring, starred Daphne Guinness. The heiress-muse got dressed for the Met’s Costume Institute ball in one of the Madison Avenue windows, vamping and mooning her way into a pale-gray ostrich-and-duck-feather gown by Alexander McQueen. Freedman has already begun to work on Christmas: Gaga’s workshop is the plan, and the Lady herself will function as an alt-world Santa Claus, enlisting God-knows-what to serve as her elves and then selling for-*Barneys-only merchandise that she designs in collaboration with Nicola Formichetti in a GagaZone on the fifth floor. It’s not going to be as edgy as some of Gaga’s videos, and some of the proceeds will go to charity. “Simon explained something to me,” Lee says, “and that’s that if your fall windows are Antonioni, your Christmas windows need to be Billy Wilder.”
A brief history of the store goes like this: First, Barney Pressman hocked his wife’s engagement ring for $500 to get things off the ground. In the beginning, Barney’s (throughout its history the store has often used the apostrophe) business was discounted men’s suits, and Barney himself didn’t care much about the *aesthetic environs in which he sold them. But he had a knack for advertising (“No Bunk, No Junk, No Imitations”) and hype: He once sent comely ladies out in barrels to entice customers on the street. Then Barney’s son Fred began to get involved. Fred shared his father’s knack for publicity and customer service (free parking for all those customers from Great Neck and Darien who came to shop at Barneys on 17th Street and Seventh Avenue) but also had an eye for European fashion and high *design. Slowly, Fred began to transform the brand into something more glamorous: In the seventies, he introduced designers like Armani to New York. He began to carry women’s merchandise, and to offer Perrier in the canteen. Then Fred’s son Gene got involved, too, and Barneys went even higher-end, with women’s merchandise overtaking men’s and plenty of floor space devoted to the Japanese avant-garde. There was an early AIDS fundraiser, in 1986, at which *Madonna worked the runway in a denim jacket. It was the ultimate merger of uptown and down, and exactly where fashion wanted to be at just that moment.
The members of Barneys’ current team are all veterans of this moment: Doonan remembers seeing Andy Warhol and Jack Nicholson shopping together for socks. Lee remembers blowing a good part of his student-loan check on a purple-and-red Norma Kamali sleeping-bag coat.
In the late eighties, Barneys began opening stores around the country, exporting New York taste to the provinces. Sometimes, as in the case of Beverly Hills, this worked. *Other times, less so. Trouble in Dallas occurred, for example, when the beauty salon refused to accommodate requests for big hair.
Back in New York, the new flagship, on Madison Avenue, opened in 1993. It was the largest specialty store to open in the city since 1929. Barneys had made the final transition to luxury, though it would seek bankruptcy protection three years later.
One night in July, the ground floor of that store was partially closed off for construction, but bits of the new Barneys had begun to appear. Gone was the glittering mosaic floor, replaced by slabs of cool gray stone. The place was already a more hard-core version of itself: luxury incarnate. A maze of temporary Sheetrock led to the elevators, and whoosh! Up on the fifth floor, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were hosting a launch party for their new handbag collection. Their label, the Row, makes clothing that is simple in shape and luxurious in quality and that, in spirit, calls to mind the work that *Calvin Klein did at the height of his reign. It is very, very expensive (the handbags range from $2,350 to $39,000), and it has one of the highest sell-through rates in the store. It is, as Daniella Vitale says, “very Barneys,” in that it is “more understated than overstated. More minimal than maximal.” None of Barneys’ direct competitors carry the line.
Vitale is all polish in a miniskirt, heels, and a tuxedo jacket by the Row. Lee and Freedman are in dark, elegant suits. All of them move through the room purposefully, with confidence. Mary-Kate Olsen appears in a robin’s-egg-blue jacket-dress. “We bought that in the blouse version,” Amanda Brooks assures Lee, before he’s even asked. Lee nods. And then he notices Elizabeth Olsen, the twins’ younger sister and this year’s Sundance breakout starlet. “Fendi heels,” he says approvingly. “Fourth floor.”
