“It Was a Crazy Scene and I was in Heaven”—Gene Pressman on Writing the Legacy of Barneys

Gene Pressman, outside Barneys on Seventeenth Street, 1981. Fairchild Archive/Getty Images

No bunk, no junk: They All Came To Barneys is a delicious fashion read. A key reason for that is that they really did all come to Barneys.

Gene Pressman’s new retail autobiography is delivered densely stitched with cameos from the many designers that he and his father Fred brought into the much-loved New York store —between Yves Saint Laurent and Bruno Piattelli in 1970 and Helmut Lang and Martin Margiela shortly before Barneys’ 1996 bankruptcy, those names include Giorgio Armani (especially fatefully for all concerned), Azzedine Alaïa, Dries Van Noten, Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, Jean Paul Gaultier, Claude Montana, Marc Jacobs, Paul Smith, Vivienne Westwood and many other runway titans.

Th