The funny thing about grief is that it has no terminus. It cycles, swells and abates, churns before once again settling into placidity. And there’s never very much warning as to when any of it is barreling your way. Or when it will mercifully subside. I could go on about the many griefs parading about just beneath my skin, but there’s one in particular I want to excavate. Maybe it’ll seem silly, superficial or otherwise unimportant. It’s ok if it does; it matters to me all the same, and I’ve been thinking about it more and more over the past couple of years. It’s about a part of New York’s fashion landscape that no longer exists – and everything that went with it.
There’s a stretch on the west side of Madison Ave between 60th and 61st that feels like a mausoleum to me. Immediately next to one another stand two structures, different in style yet alike in grandeur, that consume the block. To the south rests the former Calvin Klein flagship with the former Barneys flagship as its northern neighbor. Both endured for years without a permanent tenant, their respective windows and entryways boarded up. That is until recently with the announcement of yet more luxury condos and a new Valentino store.
For me, this sliver of the city is the most strangely melancholy I know, not for the recollection of whimsical displays or streams of customers coming and going, but something else entirely.
The first time I came to New York, on my first day in the city, I went to Barneys. It was spring break during my senior year of high school and my cousin and I drove through the night from Indiana, ostensibly to scope things out in case I attended a local university, but more so that I could experience the place I’d dreamt about for years. By the time I was 14, I knew I wanted to work in fashion and that meant being in New York. The next few years were filled with reading every coffee table book, museum catalog and glossy article I could get to educate myself on this otherworldy industry. I knew Barneys would be a sort of culmination, a place to take it all in.
Barneys became a refuge for me in the ensuing years. While I didn’t ultimately attend college in New York, I did come to live every summer beginning when I was 18 until I moved to the city permanently. Thrilling though that time may have been, from my high school graduation until I neared 30, I was more or less broke. And not in the way some people make sound bohemian upon retelling years later while also mentioning tales of European excursions and dining at hotspots nightly. I was broke in the I-just-studied-journalism-as-media-is-imploding kind of way. I’ll never forget the time I had 27 cents in my bank account, the countless times I didn’t have enough money to buy food, or the moments when even taking a subway ride was beyond my means. You’d think with so little to my name that a beacon of luxury commerce wouldn’t be my first pick as a regular haunt, but it was. Barneys meant clean restrooms and air conditioning on the city’s most sweltering days, to say nothing of the goods for sale.
I had a strategy. I would enter on the first floor at women’s accessories, work my way up every women’s floor, spend a good deal of time in the home goods department at the very top (mostly for the books), and then traverse my way down the men’s side of the store till I reached street level once again. If I really leaned into it, I could easily spend about four hours there at a time. It turned out to be an enormous, accidental education. I flipped over every cuff, turned up every hem, inspected every lining, and felt every fabric. It was its own kind of fashion school.
It wasn’t unusual for me to stop over at Calvin Klein before I ventured into Barneys. The space was a temple to minimalism and I was in heaven from the start. The walls were crisp white and nearly every garment on the sleek metal rails that lined the airy main floor came exclusively in shades of black, navy, tan and white.
Designed by architect John Pawson and opened in 1995, the store had been something of an aesthetic landmark for 15 years by the time I first entered. I dropped in fairly regularly from then on to see what Francisco Costa had conjured for the brand. One day, I was skimming through the formal womenswear on the more intimate second floor (or was it third?) when photographer Arthur Elgort walked in, camera hanging from his neck and crew in tow. Elgort passed through the space quickly, taking a few glances around before departing. I didn’t interact with him and I’m not even sure he noticed me at all, but I was struck by the magic of that small moment. Where else could you casually cross paths with a man who helped shape the fashion photography canon as we know it? Certainly not where I was from.
I’m sure this all sounds terribly dramatic. Why go on about what are essentially two shrines to extreme wealth and disposable income? And I really do get that take. They were just stores, after all. Yet there’s so much more to it than that. When I wanted to escape a throng of roommates, that’s where I went. When I was hungry with nothing to eat and needed the distraction from my aching stomach, that’s where I went. When I ventured out into the city only to realize that so many of the things I wanted to do cost money I didn’t have, that’s where I went. When I was heartbroken. When it was 100 degrees inside one of the air-conditionless rooms where I stayed. When I felt disillusioned with a job. When I needed shelter from a looming downpour. When I wanted to find the perfect fragrance I knew I couldn’t afford but wanted to take note of anyway – for someday.
What I didn’t know then was that I was taking in their last gasps. After Raf Simons’ disastrous tenure at Calvin Klein, the brand’s flagship store and the entire Collection label were shut, possibly for good, in 2019. Barneys found itself in precarious financial positions several times over the years, but in early 2020, no savior appeared as they had before to keep the business afloat.
I kept going back to Barneys for a while after its imminent closure was announced, but the first jumble of sales racks made me turn away. News articles detailing the mess of marked down goods being picked over (even store signage was hauled off by shoppers) confirmed I’d made the right choice to never go back. It was like a violation that felt more personal than it had any right to.
The whole situation foreshadowed today’s volatile markets and the proliferation of brands that skate by on name recognition with very little by way of financial viability. From 2010 to 2020, fashion became a part of pop culture and forfeited its role as a cultural leader, choosing instead to chase celebrity and anyone with cash to burn regardless of taste or values. It is, quite simply, an entirely different business than it was not very long ago.
Thinking back could make me nostalgic, but I started this off with the word “grief.” That’s something else. Recently, I’ve had the space to step back for the first time and consider what that period means to me. Joan Didion once wrote that at a certain point, she’d “lost touch with a couple of people [she] used to be,” and I can’t help but feel the same whenever I start ruminating over those early adult years. At the time, I was practically overwhelmed with what I hoped things would be, what I expected them to be, the person I assumed I’d become, the relationships I was sure were around every corner, and the life and career benchmarks I was conditioned to believe I’d cross off my list so readily thanks to persistence and hard work. Some of those things happened. Others didn’t.
Yes, when I ascribe the word grief to my memories of these two elegant shops, I’m talking about the loss they represent for fashion and designers. But perhaps more than anything else, I use it for those who crossed their thresholds and felt a yearning, a sense of possibility about a life they envisioned for themselves. I wonder how many of those dreams came true or changed entirely. And I wonder what I lost without even knowing it.