Only Barneys New York holds the answers to such esoterica. It’s the level playing field of fashion, appealing to magnates and celebrities and tourists alike, a brand that, for all its overreaching of recent years, remains remarkably durable.
Under the guidance of the chief executive, Mark Lee, who was hired last year, Barneys is updating its men’s-wear offerings, hoping to restore its place of privilege for emerging designers and styles, beginning with the redesigned Co-Op.
The old Co-Op was the Grand Central Terminal of aspirational retail, a scrum of high and low, luxe and ham-handed hip. It was as close as Barneys got to a glam shopping experience, and it could be blinding.
But there’s little remarkable about the new Co-Op space, wide and long and inconsistently lighted, with stomach-level racks stuffed full of clothes that, from afar, look half black. Colors appear like oxygen tanks on icy mountaintops, badly needed and hard to come by. A Co-Op cafe, Genes @ Co-Op, looks like the situation room from “24,” each seat matched to a screen embedded into a long communal table.
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