Tomorrow, Barneys New York will live again. The inimitable retail experience—memorialized in Sex and the City and revered by fashion obsessives around the world—will return via a pop-up shop in SoHo open through October 11. The store concept was curated and designed with the help of former Barneys geniuses Simon Doonan and Julie Gilhart, who were the creative director and fashion director, respectively, for the brand. The idea overall, however, came from Hourglass Cosmetics founder Carisa Janes, who is celebrating her own brand’s 20th anniversary. Barneys was her first stockist and, as is the case for so many designers, creatives, and beauty founders, the former department store, which closed its doors in February 2020, still holds a very meaningful place in her heart.
Barneys New York was a retail space that had no rules, that welcomed unknown labels and brands to sit amongst the likes of Prada, Armani, and Alaïa. It was aspirational but also an interactive gallerylike space where, if you couldn’t afford said Prada, Armani, or Alaïa, you could wander around, browse, talk to the well-versed, cool salespeople, and discover and try on brands totally foreign to you, but insanely fascinating and delightful. (Back in the day, that meant the likes of Rick Owens and Proenza Schouler, both of which Barneys bought before anyone else.)
The new pop-up Barneys offers that same concept, only smaller, with a mix of New York–based designers that include Marc Jacobs, Proenza Schouler, and Thom Browne alongside Luar, Willy Chavarria, Christopher John Rogers, Colleen Allen, Diotima, and many, many more. Each designer provided a small set of SKUs from their current collections to sell in the space. Some of the items are curated to a specific category, like Chavarria’s new underwear collection, while others are special one-off pieces, like a new set of animal-shaped bags from Browne. There will also be special anniversary-edition Hourglass beauty items, as well as exclusive Barneys branded merch. And of course, a Fred’s coffee shop, nodding to the store’s beloved restaurant of the same name.
“There are so many other people that could be in the pop-up,” Gilhart told me just a couple of weeks ahead of the opening. “I feel like it’s important for me to say that. I don’t want anyone to feel left out—if only we had more room.” During her time at Barneys, Gilhart oversaw a team of buyers who took to heart the famous tagline of the store: “Taste, Luxury, Humor.” Their goal was, in Gilhart’s words, to “create a place where you could discover things. That’s why you would come to Barneys. You could go to Saks or Bergdorf’s, but you came to Barneys because in front of Prada, you might discover a designer like Colleen Allen.”
During the process of curating the new pop-up, Gilhart spoke to some of the designers about their first memories of Barneys. Jackson Wiederhoeft told her he once went in to try on a pair of YSL boots he couldn’t afford, and they got stuck on his feet. Raul Lopez of Luar talked about wandering through the beauty department picking up samples. “They weren’t shopping,” Gilhart said. “But they were coming in to look and be inspired. That was the thing, the magic that you can’t put on a spreadsheet or a business plan.”
Department stores are struggling right now, and so are the ecommerce retailers. Their business models are still based in traditional big-box wholesale strategy, which often doesn’t allow for brands to cross-pollinate on the store floors or for store employees and personal shoppers to sell outside the brands they’re assigned, because of commission rules. Those surprising and delightful scenarios now often happen at small independent boutiques or during peer-to-peer shopping experiences in the digital sphere, on platforms like Substack, where a shopper might discover a new brand or designer based on a personal recommendation in a newsletter.
The Barneys pop-up is a reminder that shopping in a store can be playful, exciting, and experimental. Perhaps it will serve as a reminder to the big-box stores that with some risk often comes reward—Barneys innovated that concept. As Gilhart explained of the brand’s strategy when it came to buying and merchandising, “We put our blinders on, and we didn’t follow what anyone else was doing. You can get very distracted that way. That’s why we were first with so many things.”
She also used the word scrappy to describe some of the magic of Barneys, at both the old stores and the new pop-up. The brand’s teams were creative and innovative, and the pop-up has so much of that energy. Fitting, then, to open the doors at the start of New York Fashion Week, which is filled with communities of designers and creatives going after that same sensibility. And again, Barneys, then and now, is always about fun. “I think the heart and soul of in-person is service, and it’s about enjoying yourself,” Gilhart said. “It’s also about curation. I think the internet has made doing business more intense, but if you talk to the small stores around the country that are really good, some of them don’t have great online businesses because they don’t have the time. They’re too busy buying and working directly with customers.”
She added: “That’s the heart and soul of shopping and I think that feels very appealing right now. It’s about feeling and being inspired, being taken care of. It’s about being soulful.”
Brooke Bobb is the fashion news director at Harper’s Bazaar, working across print and digital platforms. Previously, she was a senior content editor at Amazon Fashion, and worked at Vogue Runway as senior fashion news writer.