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. You’d maybe send your 7-year-old there to distract him as you try on Stone Island coats.
Into this mush walked Usher (looking lumpy, it must be said), who was quickly surrounded by a constellation of sales associates, following him from rack to rack as he selected things to take home. “He loves fabrics,” someone told me later. Maybe then he was excited to see sweat pants in a range of materials, from Alexander Wang’s black leather to Opening Ceremony’s heavy rustic wool. For real sweating, those pants.
In places, the Co-Op is still the store’s nexus of forward thinking: killer Junya Watanabe Comme des Garçons pieces, including a raspy brown argyle shirt with blue sleeves ($915); a long, rumpled horror-film-worthy black coat by Silent by Damir Doma ($1,340), or an appealingly slouchy alpaca sweater by Patrik Ervell
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