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Bringing Barneys back as people remember it can’t simply be a business transaction, says fashion consultant Julie Gilhart, who was SVP, fashion director at Barneys for 18 years. “Barneys started out of a love and a passion for retail, and for people and talent. That was the secret sauce,” she says. “The business followed that.”
The key to getting a relaunched Barneys right would be balancing the fond nostalgia so rife within the fashion industry, with a focus on creating something novel for the modern retail scene. “With the 90s nostalgia at its peak after Love Story, it feels like a great time to revive Barneys — as long as they don’t dilute or cheapen the original vision,” says Malcolm Carfrae, founder of Carfrae Consulting and Calvin Klein’s former chief communications officer. “It needs to be relevant for now, not a copy of what worked decades ago.”
Gilhart agrees. She’s not confident that the ‘old’ Barneys can ever return, but does believe that there are lessons to be learned from the store’s approach to business. “If you put the right partners together, you could probably come up with a Barneys-esque store — but you would have to have real, true merchants and retailers that have their finger on the pulse, are willing to take risks and aren’t looking at how their neighbors did it,” she says. “If they wanted to do something fun and inspiring, that would create business.”
Money matters
The number one factor that would determine Barneys’s success in 2026 is investment, Pressman says. “Whoever is financing this [must be] willing to infuse enough capital to make it happen. There’s no cutting corners,” he says.
Though Authentic has said it would look at opening smaller Barneys concept stores, Pressman is strong in his conviction that, if it’s going to operate large stores, Barneys should only exist in two places: New York and Los Angeles. (It can — and should — have an internet presence, he adds.)
Burke is also dubious about Authentic’s reported plans to open Barneys in its original location. “It would be compared to the original Barneys, which was built over decades,” he says. Instead, Burke would like to see Barneys open in stages, starting smaller to better execute its curation.
After all, Barneys’s most important investment will be in its merchandise. Here, the store must lift from its pre-2000s playbook and focus on young, emerging designers. “It’s about energy, belief, commitment and working with young designers — but it needs capital,” Pressman says. Taking the time — and the risk — to seek out and invest in unknown talent is a tall order in 2026, when margins are thin and each dollar must be spent wisely. It’s also the only way to stand out.
“You don’t want another rack of Chloé, another rack of LVMH [brands],” Sykes says. “They’ve got to go out there and find the cool, smaller brands that get people excited because they haven’t seen them on every single person they know.”
Back in the day, the Barneys team was also fiercely competitive, says Burke, who worked at competitor Bergdorf Goodman at the time. “The demands of exclusivity by Barneys were very important to them, and they would get behind the brands and support them,” he says. This would be even more competitive in 2026, as independent boutiques are better able to discover and enlist early-stage brands, and bigger legacy players like Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom lean further into emerging designers, earlier on — once again, requiring a bigger investment from Barneys.
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