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12 | THURSDAY, AUGUST 8, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
style
It’s hard to remember, now that every e-
tailer from the luxury Net-a-Porter to
the accessible ASOS has a section on its
website devoted to “festival fashion”;
now that brands like Saint Laurent,
Calvin Klein and Amazon host special
“activations” at Coachella; and now that
influencers descend on Governors Ball
to snap totally manufactured pictures of
themselves swaying in product-placed
ecstasy to whatever band of the moment
is playing. But when it all began, “festi-
val” and “fashion” were actually oppos-
ing concepts.
In fact, what you wore to the first was
selected specifically as a protest against
the second: chosen to make a statement
of individuality and rebellion against the
dictates not just of the establishment but
the designers who dressed them. Or so it
was at Woodstock, the upstate New
York gathering 50 years ago this month
where an aesthetic was encoded that
has formed the DNA of all festival style
that followed, but which was originally
based on rejection.
The fashion of Woodstock was the
fashion of no fashion at all.
It was the anti-little shift dress, anti-
Peter-Pan collar and windowpane
check. The anti-sport coat, anti-mock
turtle terry cloth striped V-neck. The
anti-pinafore, anti-cardigan — anti all
those garments that had become
synonymous with the working uniforms
of avenues from Madison to Massachu-
setts. It was anti-bras and anti-shoes.
Before we freed the nipple, they freed
the breasts and feet. An anti-commer-
cial, anticapitalist assertion of identity,
made through clothes (at least when
clothes were involved at all) and docu-
mented in photographs of denim-clad,
flower-crowned boys and girls (and ba-
bies) dancing in the mud, slung across
car hoods and grassy knolls, streaming
down the dust-and-trash-strewn road.
Instead, the dress code — unofficial,
of course, product of a mass mind-meld
that made a mash-up of peace, love and
material — celebrated the handmade:
the crocheted and macramé vest and de-
tail, upsized from potholders and furni-
ture doilies, the kind you learn to make
in arts and crafts classes but that was re-
invented as a new kind of homewear (so
much cooler than homewares) at Yas-
gur’s Farm, where Woodstock took
place. It favored tie-dye long before the
fashion world got hold of it and changed
its name to “dégradé” — back when any-
one could take an old T-shirt, twist it, se-
cure with rubber bands, and dip into
vats of dye for a sunburst, multicolored
look that called to mind a wearable ka-
leidoscope, or a Crayola-saturated trip.
It embraced denim, the hallmark of
the revolution and the youth movement.
As William S. Burroughs once said of
Jack Kerouac, his book “sold a trillion
Levis and a million espresso coffee ma-
chines, and also sent countless kids on
the road.” And that, apparently, led
many of them to Woodstock, the better
to show off jeans faded and ripped; worn
on the tip of the hip bone purposely to
expose the midriff and belly button;
held on with rope or big, leather belts.
It championed the hippie trail: the
fabrics that could be found while back-
packing from Kathmandu to Pokhara,
Rajasthan to Kerala, tapestries trans-
formed into sarongs with a knot and a
needs must; napkins tied into halter
necks tops; colors and patterns that
mapped out the search for enlighten-
ment through cultures and communes
and the back of one’s hand.
This was long before anyone began
thinking about issues of cultural appro-
priation, of course, since easily half the
attendees at Woodstock would have
been guilty as charged. Not only in their
assimilation of ethnic styles, but in their
apparent obsession with the fringing
and beadwork of Native American
dress: swinging from halter tops and
suede vests over not much else at all,
blowin’ in the wind, all of it meant to con-
nect their pledge of harmony, personal
and musical, to the mythic stereotypes
of indigenous people and living in alli-
ance with nature.
And though this cornucopia of denim
and Indian print and fringe and tie-dye
and crochet was united — from the van-
tage point of history — in its somewhat
hackneyed celebration of D.I.Y. self-ex-
pression, in its embrace of both ultra-
mini-dresses and mud-sweeping maxi-
skirts, bell-bottoms and crop tops, it was
also tribal. As a result, it formed the uni-
form of the counterculture. Though
those involved would probably have
considered “uniform” to be a dirty word.
There’s an irony in that, though at the
time no one saw it, and even though it
doesn’t come close to the irony of what
has happened to the trends enshrined at
the feet of Jerry Garcia and Janis Joplin.
Because like it or not, that’s what they
have become: trends. That it never oc-
curred to the group who created festival
fashion that it might one day turn into a
style sector of its own; that it would
birth an era of mass-produced ersatz in-
dividuality — the kind that can be
donned with a boho deluxe slip — is re-
flective of the naïveté in which such
fashion was born, and the calculated
way nostalgia for that time has been ex-
ploited.
So now, instead of a mantra, we have a
marketing line: Tune in, turn on, dress
(and pay) up.
Before festival fashion, there was anti-fashion
At Woodstock, clothes
were statement of identity,
not of commercialism
BY VANESSA FRIEDMAN
GETTY IMAGES
GETTY IMAGES
Bell-bottoms, above, and flowered kaftans,
right, were part of the counterculture
uniforms of the Woodstock generation,
which didn’t like the term “uniforms.”
ROWLAND SCHERMAN/SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND UNIVERSITY
ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST
Fringed buckskin halter tops, top, and headbands, above, were de rigueur among the
Woodstock festivalgoers’ obsession with Native American dress.
ROWLAND SCHERMAN/SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST
Easily half the attendees
at Woodstock would have
been guilty as charged for
cultural appropriation.
It has been striking, over the last few
weeks, to watch the almost gleeful flow
of reports and speculation about the
maybe-probably-now-confirmed bank-
ruptcy of Barneys New York, the fa-
bled department store.
Starting in mid-July, when Reuters
broke the news that a rent hike at the
Madison Avenue store was putting
Barneys under untenable pressure, the
rumors have come with notably regu-
larity: It could happen as early as this
week! O.K., maybe next week! They
have hired bankruptcy advisers! De-
signers won’t send their merch! Bath-
rooms aren’t being cleaned!
And so on, until Monday, when it all
proved true.
Barneys is not the first New York
store to have problems, nor the first
department store. The sector as a
whole has been experiencing a major
retrenchment in the face of changing
consumer shopping habits and the
growth of e-tail, which has made going
to a store much more about experience
than just buying stuff.
As Scott Malkin, the founder of the
luxury outlet malls Value Retail, once
told The New York Times: “The war is
over. Alibaba won.”
And unlike stores like Henri Bendel
and Lord & Taylor, which have disap-
peared from the map of Manhattan —
Lord & Taylor becoming (shock! hor-
ror!) a WeWork — Barneys is staying
on Madison. (The company is downsiz-
ing 15 other locations but using $
million in debtor-in-possession financ-
ing to restructure the business. That’s
the point of the Chapter 11.)
Yet its ills have been chronicled with
almost obsessive attention. Indeed, it’s
possible the attention contributed to
the ills: As the store stayed silent
about what was going on, rumors flew,
creating an atmosphere that sent
many of the smaller designers Barneys
stocks into fits of nervous terror as
they worried about what they would do
with orders the store placed five
months ago and for which they feared
they might never be paid.
At which point they decided to stop
delivering the orders, at which point
Barneys looked like it was in more
trouble, and so on.
So what makes Barneys so special?
Why was the tale of woe at this store
different from the tales of all other
stores?
Because of what Barneys set itself
up to represent.
From the beginning — especially in
the beginning — Barneys held itself
apart from the other department
stores, not only in New York but pretty
much everywhere. Its Madison Avenue
store, which opened in 1993, was an
extravagantly unmistakable symbol of
that separateness and that aspiration:
the largest new specialty store to be
built in Manhattan since the Depres-
sion, and one that broke all the rules.
As Gene Pressmen, the grandson of
Barney Pressmen, the founder, told
The Times: “Of course, there are a lot
of stores uptown. But there’ll be only
one Barneys. We’re different.”
Employing the architect Peter Ma-
rino, the current crown prince of fash-
ion store design (he created the look of
boutiques for Armani, Dior, Louis
Vuitton, Zegna), the company let him
loose to change the paradigm.
That’s what the Pressmans did,
starting when Fred (second genera-
tion, father of Bob and Gene) brought
Armani’s relaxed tailoring to the
United States in 1975 and threw men’s
suiting into an uproar.
As he did, so did Gene with women’s
wear, championing Rei Kawakubo of
Comme des Garçons and Azzedine
Alaïa, of the clinging bandage dress, as
well as black in all its permutations,
and the idea of the exclusive. As
Joshua Levine writes in his 1999 book,
“The Rise and Fall of the House of
Barneys,” “If it couldn’t be bought
differently, Barneys insisted that it be
made differently.”
Barneys changed trims and buttons
according to its own taste. Just as with
Mr. Marino’s store designs, it changed
the conventional wisdom about how a
store should be organized. It put per-
fumes at the back of the first floor
instead of the front, as was customary
(perfume being an entry-level prod-
uct); it put Kazuko Oshima’s idiosyn-
cratic jewelry constructions of crystals
and semiprecious stones wrapped in
wires at the front; and, most of all, it
used the windows — windows! — on
most floors to let the light in, instead of
covering the walls to create more shelf
and rack space. The implicit message,
on all counts: Barneys knows best.
The result was wonderful for the new
designers the store might take a gam-
ble on (despite the fact that Barneys
often demanded exclusivity in return, a
promise that could seem alluring but
often proved stifling), and it made
Barneys a destination for shopping
tourists in search of the cutting edge.
But it was also unabashedly elitist,
proudly exclusionary — you got it or
you didn’t, and if you didn’t, that was
your problem, not theirs — and imbued
with an arrogance that, at a certain
point, began to chafe. Even if it did feel
representative of a certain, almost
fictional, New York ethos.
And though the Pressmans lost
control of the store after its first bank-
ruptcy filing in 1996, and in 2010 a new
management team embarked on a
renovation that gave the store a more
familiar, if somewhat generic, ele-
gance, and it became much more inter-
ested in service (a change that, per-
versely, caused many to start mourn-
ing its former, our-way-or-the-highway
incarnation), Barneys never quite lost
that reputation.
As a result, when the possibility of
its demise was discussed, it was with a
certain lascivious horror: Ooh, it would
be terrible, but we just can’t look away.
Barneys put itself up on a precisely
buffed onyx pedestal that it built for
itself, and it turned out everyone was
just waiting to knock it off. To blame it
for not recognizing the rise of digital
fast enough or for abandoning its
original idiosyncrasy. To see this as a
story of taste atrophy, more than, say,
the shadow real estate world, or disaf-
fected ownership, when it was proba-
bly a combination of all three.
If the attention paid to the bank-
ruptcy proves anything, however, it is
that the brand itself still resonates
(and rankles) in the imagination. In
other words, the rumor mill will now
turn to whether or not a buyer for the
company will emerge.
Let the speculation begin! But as it
does, it’s worth remembering: As
much as chroniclers of New York love
a comeuppance story, they also love a
comeback.
Pride and the fall of Barneys New York
Vanessa Friedman
UNBUTTONED
Barneys on Madison Avenue in New York will remain, but 15 other locations will not.
ANDREW RENNEISEN/THE NEW YORK TIMES
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