For decades, Barneys department store was a microcosm of what was cool about New York City. Its retail and window designs were uniquely improvisational and artistic, offering creative ingenuity and intrigue you wouldn’t see in stuffy uptown shops. Those stores sold more austere takes on aspirational buying.
Barneys also had fashion that shoppers couldn’t find anywhere else, due to exclusives with designers like Prada and Dries Van Noten. Located downtown among the city’s artists, eccentrics, and cultural tastemakers, longtime Barney’s creative director and famed window dresser, Simon Doonan, recalls: “The thing that was significant about Barneys was that we were unconventional.” Barneys wasn’t associated with ladies who lunch. Its big spenders were artistic icons like Madonna, who shaped our very culture before their well-heeled feet.
Today, Barneys is reopening for a limited time at 14 Prince street, in New York City’s Soho neighborhood downtown, as part of luxury cosmetics line Hourglass Cosmetics’ 20th anniversary. (Hourglass originally launched at Barneys.) The pop-up includes designers you’ll know from Barneys of yore and new talent alike: 3.1 Phillip Lim, Altuzarra, Christopher John Rogers, Ella Emhoff, KHAITE, Marc Jacobs, Peter Do, Proenza Schouler, Sandy Liang, Thom Browne, and Wiederhoeft among others.
The pop up will also include an Hourglass beauty bar at its center, with two limited-edition, collaborative Barneys products: an “ambient lighting” palette and a lipstick duo. Its packaging is designed by Barneys Book illustrator Na Kim.
Here, we chat with Doonan, who was also the creative director for the pop up, about fashion today, how retail culture has changed, and what he learned from collaborating with titans of art and design over decades.
Fast Company: The Barneys pop up is part of Hourglass cosmetics 20th anniversary. Why bring Barneys downtown as part of this anniversary?
Simon Doonan: The relationship between Hourglass and Barneys is rock solid, and goes back to 20 years to the launch at Barneys. So why not partner? I think audaciously, Hourglass wanted to introduce ready to wear clothing, fashion, so they engaged Julie [Gilhart, Barneys fashion director] and then myself to work on the visuals. It was a very bold, brilliant idea that seems to be generating a lot of buzz. It was a good instinct, whoever had that idea.
I think they thought, well, what was Barney’s known for? In addition to obviously launching their cosmetic line, Barney’s was known for launching all these incredible lines. We had them exclusive for decades. I won’t brag on and on and on, but everyone from Prada to all the Belgians, Dries Van Noten, you know—that was why people went to Barney’s back in the day, because they could get stuff that you couldn’t get anywhere else.
We made a very significant impact in fashion. Helmut Lang, Giorgio Armani, Alaia; those were our people among many others. Julie is a visionary. She was able to see these people coming and build a relationship with them. That was what was so exciting about going to Barney’s—to see the clothing. Not just the ambience of the store, obviously, but like fashion, fashion, fashion.
So you’re the creative director of the Barneys pop up. What was your approach to bringing this pop up to life?
The thing that was significant about Barneys was that we were unconventional. A lot of luxury stores were posh and more conventional. Our journey began downtown, so there weren’t any rules for us. Uptown, there was a certain convention to being a big, glamorous store. They had rules.
We started out in 1923 as a discount store, so we could completely reinvent ourselves; in the ‘80s in particular, which was a time when fashion, art, style all collided. If you think about Keith Haring, Madonna, Andy Warhol, all the music, the beginnings of rap, and also graffiti. New York was an amazing place; a collision of different cultures, and Barneys was right at the center of it.
The original downtown Barneys, which is now closed, seems to have been such a symbol for a particular era of New York. What did the downtown Barneys represent as a New York symbol?
It was definitely a cultural center. Madonna, Warhol, the people I’ve met, they all shopped there; the artists shopped there. And then, of course, all the Wall Street guys shopped there, and all the Fashionistas. As people moved downtown, Tribeca and Soho began to happen. They all became very committed Barneys’ customers.
How has fashion and the shopping experience of fashionable people evolved since your time at Barneys?
I think fashion now is incredible. I enjoy it immensely. It’s a much bigger landscape. Back in the day, fashion was elite. It was expensive. It was a smaller group of people who were involved in that world. Famously, you couldn’t sell a screenplay in Hollywood if it was about fashion in the ‘80s. They said people aren’t interested. They’re interested in sports, blah, blah, blah.
Then fashion became, bit by bit, piece by piece, a giant, global spectator sport—and to such an extent it’s actually hard to remember there was a time when it wasn’t that. It was something that didn’t really touch a lot of people. Now it touches everyone. If you want to be a fashion magnate, you can open an Etsy store. You can buy anything you fancy at any price point.
It’s a great time for fashion because it’s sort of democratized, globalized. And it’s really fun. When I walk around Lower Manhattan, there’s incredible dynamism. It reminds me—because I’m so old—of London in the ‘60s. Kings Road, Barnaby Street; where people would take a small space and paint art nouveau lilies on the windows and have all these groovy clothes. It was an improvisational time. I think we’re in one of those times now, which is great. Very exciting.
What is your fashion advice to those navigating the seemingly ever-faster TikTok trend cycles?
I would say don’t bother. Look at it all and respond to the things that resonate with you. I wrote a book a few years ago called Eccentric Glamour, essentially thinking about the way women dress. I divided them into existentialists, which is avant garde, women like Tilda Swinton; socialites, which is conventional glamor, like a lot of people on TV; and bohemians.
Once you know who you are, it’s actually really fun and very easy to go shopping. You don’t get overwhelmed with being bombarded by trends because you’re able to quickly recognize which stuff is resonating with you. Once style becomes self expression, you know who you are and you aren’t baffled by trends. All the women I know are much too smart to be baffled by trends.
What do the best retail experiences look like to you today?.
At Barneys, our priority was to intrigue people. It wasn’t to be super snooty and make them feel uncomfortable. It was to intrigue them. What are people interested in? That’s why we were able to get such an incredible clientele like sports people, celebrities, intellectuals, artists. Because we just focused on being intriguing, interesting, and exceeding their expectations. That’s the key, and that remains true today. People want to be intrigued.
I can give you three good examples [at the Barneys pop up]. Instead of simple tables with cosmetics or product on them, we thought, let’s decoupage them all with pages from the novels of prominent women. Jane Austen, Alice Walker, Isabel Allende. That’s a very Barneys thing. You don’t ever want to just have a table. You have to do something to it using an improvisational technique, not something super formal. You can go crafty.
Then, speaking of crafty, we have this giant poodle that’s an homage to the Hourglass world. It’s got a big tiara made out of Hourglass product. The piece de resistance is right near the door. We have this massive gold Porta Potty. When I looked at the Hourglass website, I thought, “gold, gold, gold.” They have all this beautiful gold packaging. So we did this gold Porta Potty that was originally going to be a changing room.
Now it’s become like an experiential thing. It sort of landed on the Wicked Witch, so the Wicked Witch’s legs are coming out from under it. It’s a piece of installation art that’s intriguing. It’s like a “what the” kind of moment. The interior is an Instagrammable space. So I would say those three elements are designed to purely entertain and intrigue the customer and make them feel that they’re at Barneys.
You wrote in a 2021 essay for The Times that when you started as head window dresser at Barneys, it was “reinventing itself as the first cool department store on Earth.” The idea of “cool” is so subjective. What does “cool” mean to you and what made Barneys cool compared to other department stores?
Cool has to be engaging and playful and eccentric. It can’t be just “look how austere and glamorous and snooty we all are.” It’s got to be engaging. That’s a philosophy that I got from doing windows. Windows speak to the general public. They’re on the street. You have to communicate with everyone. They’re very, very democratic, as opposed to fashion advertising, which can be a lot more esoteric. Windows needs to communicate.
I always thought of myself as a bit like a Coney Island carnie, wanting to engage people; get their attention with color and playful ideas and using celebrity caricatures in the window. We did so many Madonna windows because she was a good customer. So, playful and engaging, not “cool” as in remote and withholding.
Hourglass is not that kind of brand. Neither was Barneys. There was a wonderful, incredible guy who worked at Barneys called Glenn O’Brien, who was quite well known. He wrote for Interview magazine. He was very friendly with Andy Warhol. When we opened the store downtown, he wrote this copy line that was a big kapow in 1986: “down to earth, out of this world.”
That’s very Barney. It’s communicative, it’s playful, but it’s also beyond, and great stuff you can’t get anywhere else. That’s an important thing. That’s also what we have in common with Hourglass. Hourglass is a luscious, incredible brand. It’s so beautifully executed, but there’s a warmth to it. It’s not intimidating.
You’ve collaborated with so many talented artists and designers: sculptor Claes Oldenburg, Warhol, Basquiat, Keith Haring, Yves Saint Laurent, Azzedine Alaïa, Karl Lagerfeld. What did you learn from working with these cultural icons about creative originality?
I was very lucky to be in a position where Barneys was their store. All these titans of the art world and pop stars. So we could reach out to them, and they would think it was just a goof. We didn’t have to go through tiers of managers and PR people. They were incredibly responsive, because they love Barneys.
So what did I learn from them? Somebody might seem very intimidating, like a big, major artist, like Rauschenberg or Madonna or Warhol. But when you actually collaborate with people, you realize they’re just trying to get through the day and get their obligations taken care of. It’s very, very unusual to come across somebody who’s just truly not groovy and not easy breezy. Everybody I collaborated with was always super fun and collaborative.
And creatively, windows change so rapidly. There are multiple windows. So every day some window or other is changing on a big store that was a whole block. So early on in my window career, I learned that you have to have, like, a billion ideas in a manila folder; sketches, thoughts. You can’t wait for the day to come around when it’s window time.
I also learned that windows is a very forgiving profession. If you do one that’s a bit of a dud, people don’t care. It’s gone in a week, and you put something better in. Window display is very forgiving, very fun, and it’s very ephemeral, so it’s changing all the time.
I was lucky. I’m so glad I got into that instead of saying, “Oh, I want to be a fine artist.” That would be very hard for me to sit in a room and think about, “Is this me? Is this not me?” Because within windows, it had to be different all the time so it didn’t look like the window from the previous week.
What did window dressing teach you about fashion?
I was very lucky because to work at Maxfield and Barneys, where while you’re creating windows, you’re also learning about all these incredible people that make clothes. I worked in a tailor shop in the ‘70s. I worked at Turnbull and Astor on German Street as well. I was always interested in construction and how things are made. That’s what I learned through always looking at the clothes, saying, “Look at this inside out. It’s so beautifully made.” I learned to appreciate the craft of fashion.