PARAPHERNALIA (late sixties)
Brought the mini to Manhattan.
DEAN & DELUCA (opened in 1977)
Before you knew it, we were all eating arugula.
BLOOMINGDALE’S (circa 1978)
The city was broke, but Bloomie’s was disco-fabulous with an ad campaign encouraging singles to pick each other up amid the racks. Andy Warhol called it a “museum of the people.”
FIORUCCI (late seventies)
Where Sister Sledge’s “Greatest Dancer” shopped: “He wears the finest clothes / The best designers heaven knows … Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci.”
THE WOMEN’S STORE UPSTAIRS AT BARNEYS ON WEST 17TH STREET (1981)
Gene Pressman invites the European designers in, and shortly Armani owns us.
CHARIVARI (early eighties)
When Columbus Avenue was hip (can you imagine?)
. Marc Jacobs was a salesboy!
RALPH LAUREN MANSION(opened in 1986)
Shopping as Wasp-role-playing game at the height of the Reagan era.
CANAL JEANS (the early nineties)
The House of Grunge, cheap parkas, and aisles and aisles of CK briefs. Streetwear for slumming Daltonites.
UPTOWN FAIRWAY(opened in 1993)
Why move to Montclair when you can do your gourmet suburban shopping in Harlem?
MOSS (opened in 1994)
Flagship store for the Wallpaper* generation. Everyone’s a design snob!
CALVIN KLEIN STORE ON MADISON AVENUE (opened in 1995)
Retail gets sacred.
BARNES & NOBLE(late nineties)
Giant chain takes over Manhattan, and we all buy in. Since then, it’s impossible to think out of the big box.
MANOLO BLAHNIK(circa 1998)
The ultimate power rite-of-passage becomes dropping $1,200 on a pair of lizard sling-backs.
H&M(opened in 2000)
Trends moving at fever pitch, clothes you keep for a week.
THE PRADA STORE, SOHO (opened in 2001)
Groovy Koolhaas-designed mausoleum of the Internet-bubble aesthetic.
CENTURY 21 (now and forever)
If you live in New York, why pay retail?
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Dress for Excess: When Barneys could transform you. (New York Magazine’s 35th anniversary issue)