Yahoo Lifestyle The New Barneys Pop-Up Reminds Us That Shopping Should Be Fun
Tomorrow, Barneys New York will live again. The inimitable retail experience that was 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 11th. 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. The idea overall however was that of Hourglass Cosmetics founder Carisa Janes, who is celebrating the 20th anniversary of her brand this year. Barneys was her first stockist and, like so many designers, creatives, and beauty founders, the store 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 Prada, Armani, and Alaïa. It was aspirational but also an interactive gallery-like space where, if you couldn’t afford said Prada, Armani, or Alaïa, you could wander around, browse, talk to the well-versed, cool sales people, try on, and discover brands totally foreign but insanely fascinating and delightful to you (back in the day, those were the likes of Rick Owens and Proenza Schouler, both of which Barney’s 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 to sell in the space from their current collections. Some of the items are curated to a specific category, like Chavarria’s new underwear collection, while others are offering 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 Barney’s 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 Barney’s Gilhart oversaw a team of buyers who took to heart the famous tagline of the store: “Taste, Luxury, Humour.” Their goal was to, in Gilhart’s words, “create a place where you could discover things. That’s why you would come to Barneys. You could go to Saks or Bergdorfs 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 Barney’s. Jackson Wiederhoeft told her that he once went in to try on a pair of YSL boots he couldn’t afford and they got stuck. 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-polinate on the store floors or for store employees and personal shoppers to sell outside of the brands they’re assigned because of commission rules. That surprise and delight often comes now from small, independent boutiques or peer-to-peer shopping experiences in the digital-sphere, namely 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 Barneys 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, both the old and the in the new pop-up. The teams were creative and innovative, and the new 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 bery appealing right now.” “It’s about feeling and being inspired, being taken care of. It’s about being soulful.”
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