“It Was a Crazy Scene and I was in Heaven”—Gene Pressman on Writing the Legacy of Barneys

Sure! I just watched his series about Mussolini, which is extremely good.

He’s a brilliant English director, and I really wanted an English director. If you read the book you’ll know I’m a film maniac, and during that ’67 to ’73 film enlightenment the English were so incredible, and even if Stanley Kubrick wasn’t English he lived there and was part of it…

I enjoyed your description in the book of going to see 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time while at college, high on acid: that must have been quite impactful. And then before you started at Barneys, you went to try and break into Hollywood at the dawn of the 1970s and were offered a porn audition by the producer of Deep Throat. These are just two of many personal episodes, from Woodstock to Studio 54 and onwards that put you right at the heart of the wider American story of the time.

I was really lucky to live at certain moments, exactly at the right age, at the right time, and to experience them. You know, I had nothing to do with it, other than being there, obviously.

How did this influence your work alongside your grandfather Barney, your father Fred, and your brother Bob at Barneys?

Well it wasn’t just about the American experience. I think that the more you can absorb in terms of other cultures and other people’s point of views from all over the world, and then bring it back and sort of put it in a mixer within an American sort of mentality is really, it’s a very special thing. Because Americans, for the most part, have been very lucky with this extraordinary sense of freedom to do whatever they want. That’s why, culturally, they’ve created so much, you know, because they’re not, they don’t have the same restraints, if you will. Whereas Europe benefits a great deal from its history of culture and that amazing sensibility, but this does cramp their style a little bit on the other hand, you know, but we won’t get into that.

For the fashion reader, a chunk of this book’s interest lies in hearing how first Fred and then you traveled the world with your colleagues from Barneys looking for the treasures your instinct told you could really excite your home audience. I love the stories about Dries, Alaïa, Paul Smith, Kenzo and Yohji Yamamoto for instance…