So the dust has settled on the sale of the stores once known as Barneys New York. The final shopping has begun at their soon-to-be-vacated locations, and the social media mourning is in full swing. Saks has emerged as a caretaker of the retail self of a former rival, licensed to Saks’s parent company by Authentic Brands Group, which bought Barneys’ intellectual property.
Now the drumroll has begun for a new concept: Barneys-at-Saks. It is a … something … that will possibly be on the fifth floor of the Saks department store in New York, and will possibly be about 50,000 square feet, and will possibly be, well, no one is exactly sure. I’ve been a customer at both — Saks for its accessible elegance, Barneys for its more rarefied cool — for much of my adult shopping life, and days after the news broke, I’m still trying to understand what this new hybrid could be.
During the bankruptcy auction, Marc Metrick, the chief executive of Saks, and Tracy Margolies, the chief merchant, sent a letter to the company’s partners that gives a little hint: “We are working to best understand what customers love about the brand and how we can bring that forward as we evolve it into a new interpretation that is relevant for today’s luxury consumer.”
But what exactly will that new interpretation be? Isn’t shopping in a Barneys at Saks sort of like browsing a Nike section at an Adidas shop or grabbing a Whopper at the home of the Big Mac? It’s confusing to the taste buds and redundant in the Darwinian order of things.
To be fair, the license for the name apparently didn’t cost Saks too much — the company expects to devote only “minimal financial resources,” according to the letter. So perhaps for Saks, the optics of becoming the big retail whale, swallowing its rival whole, may be worth the confusion. Saks might also believe that Barneys is that rare mercantile unicorn: a store that transcends the goods it sells.
They are betting, in effect, on the anthropomorphism of retail.
That’s the premise, anyway, of this unexpected move by ABG, the company that owns the Barneys brand. ABG is presuming that in today’s multiplatform world, a brand name and what it stands for is the most valuable form of commodity. Products are fungible and of secondary consideration, and ABG has proof of concept for this strategy in the form of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali and Elvis Presley, among other branded people, like Judith Leiber and Vince Camuto, whose trademarks ABG also owns and licenses.
This may be true for individuals, who endure through voice and image in photos and films. That lasting record preserves the meaning of their names even as they are slapped on mugs sold at Walmart. And this may make sense for a designer brand with its own creative archive. But a store is a different matter.
Especially a store that does not itself make anything, but simply selects — or in today’s parlance, “curates.” That sort of store, which is to say, the Barneys sort of store, is above all given meaning not just through its physical presence, its décor and the products it stocks, but also through the people it attracts. So it has been from the Greek agora through Zola’s “The Ladies Paradise”: the gathering place of the group. It is this constantly evolving give-and-take between animating principles that makes a store a destination.
When other retail pairings have worked — Topshop at Nordstrom, Maria Luisa at Printemps in Paris — it is because they represent two entirely different points of view, each with its own clubhouse. Even if ABG might keep a Barneys store in Boston or open one in Greenwich, Conn., as rumor has it, it won’t be the same without the Madison Avenue flagship.
Shorn of its once idiosyncratic temples to cool and separated by generations from the man who gave his name to the store (there really was a Barney, and his grandson Gene at least tried to be the embodiment of the cool the brand was selling) and absent a recognizable brand semiology like Bloomingdale’s Big Brown Bag, Barneys becomes just a word. And a memory.
Arguably, the generation for whom the store was most resonant — those who came of age in the “Sex and the City” era, when Barneys was shorthand for New York’s most impenetrably chic inner circle — are already past target-consumer age. And for those who are the targets, Gens Y and Z, Barneys means very little. It’s just another passé department store, like Bonwit Teller or B. Altman, where their parents or grandparents used to shop.
It is possible that Saks can change that, by imbuing its Barneys with totally different products and a palpable attitude. Barneys could become, for example, an incubator for new designers, which it sort of was back in the day. It is possible this could signal a whole new stage in retail relationships. ABG’s chief executive told Women’s Wear Daily that other luxury retailers have already made inquiries. Just imagine it: Barneys at Lane Crawford! Barneys at Tsum! Barneys at Selfridges!
And it is possible that in the time it takes Barneys at Saks to materialize, former Barneys shoppers will nurture their nostalgia instead of moving on and will ultimately migrate to Barneys at Saks because they still want those particular branded French fries, rather than the other type of branded fries.
But it is also possible that at some point they will just shrug their shoulders and acknowledge they come from the same potatoes. And that the next era of retail really requires cooking up something entirely different.
This article originally appeared in
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