Newsmaker of the Year: Barneys in Retrospect and Evaluating the Remnants

What Barneys New York once was is what retailers should be — exciting, experiential, innovative and au courant. “It was all about curation and style and editing where you could see what was going on in culture and fashion,” observed Robin Kramer of the Kramer Design Group. “It wasn’t just a place to buy stuff or what new designer you could find on a rack. It was clubby and really about community as much as buying products. It was a hotbed of creativity, not just clothes.” “It’s ironic. Barneys started as a discounter almost a 100 years ago and now is saying goodbye like a discounter again. It’s heartbreaking,” lamented one former longtime Barneys executive. “What you see in the store now is not all Barneys-bought. Much of it has been bought by the liquidator.” “Watching Barneys evaporate is very, very hard. To me, Barneys was aspirational,” said Marian Salzman, senior vice president of global communications for Philip Morris Products. “In my 20s and 30s, I longed for the day when I earned enough money to shop there.…But Barneys represented a point in time. It never reinvented. Other stores like Zara, Old Navy and Bloomingdale’s have done better jobs of recognizing a new

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