Phyllis Pressman, the matriarch of the household that based Barneys New York, the low cost males’s clothes retailer turned luxurious emporium – and the creator of Chelsea Passage, the shop’s dwelling items bazaar, a pivotal level in its evolution from a swimsuit service provider to an elite life-style large – died on Tuesday in Palm Seashore, Florida. She was 95 years previous.
His demise, in a hospice, was introduced by his son Gene Pressman.
Barneys has at all times been a household affair. He was appointed to Barney Pressman, who in 1923 pawned his spouse’s ring, at her encouragement, for $500 to purchase the lease on a small retailer at Seventh Avenue and seventeenth Avenue in Manhattan. There, he constructed an empire promoting designer fits at discounted costs. His son, Fredwho took over within the Fifties, reworked the place into an upscale males’s retailer that included European designers.
Phyllis Pressman, married to Fred, began working on the retailer so she may spend extra time with him. Her first intervention was to stylize the home windows, which she discovered boring, including mannequins and eccentric objects like papier-mâché canine. She then started adorning the shop’s inside with antiques, jewellery and home goods, in addition to objects and materials she discovered on her journeys to the Marché aux Puces in Paris and Portobello Highway in London.
Within the late Seventies, Fred Pressman lined an alley adjoining to his property on the seventeenth Avenue aspect with a skylight and turned it over to his spouse to fill with home goods. They referred to as it Chelsea Passage.
Mrs. Pressman’s eyes have been impeccable and her tastes have been Catholic. She carried surrealist ornamental objects by Italian designer Piero Fornasetti and items by English artwork deco ceramicist Clarice Cliff. There have been teapots with roses by Mary Rose Younger, in addition to hand-painted pillows, placemats and vintage jewellery. She offered cutlery, glasses and linens, inserting the items in vintage furnishings – marble-topped butcher’s tables, wicker sofas, Artwork Deco bars – which, on the request of shoppers, she started promoting as nicely. She offered Li-Lac goodies in home windows designed by the younger Peter Marino.
As Chelsea Passage grew, so did Barneys. Fred Pressman’s sons, Gene and Robert, reworked the place as their father had, overseeing the creation within the mid-Nineteen Eighties of a girls’s retailer with interiors designed by Mr. Pressman. Andrée PutmanJean-Paul Beaujard and others.
Chelsea Passage occupied all the first ground like a gorgeous souk.
Pressman sought out distinctive handcrafted gadgets and labored with artisans to create items to his specs, adjusting the blade of a knife or the peak and form of a glass. She requested jewellery designers to make serviette rings. She was the primary to promote works by the exuberant designer Jonathan Adler, who taught pottery at night time, turned him right into a full-time manufacturing potter along with his orders. “I wouldn’t exist with out her,” Adler mentioned by cellphone.
She was agency about exclusives. If artisans began promoting elsewhere, she would take away them from Chelsea Passage.
She was choosy and exacting — a perfectionist and a completionist — recalled Lisa Barr, who was employed as a clerk and have become a senior vp at Chelsea Passage. When Pressman determined that Chelsea Passage would add gourmand meals reminiscent of imported teas, she despatched Barr to a tea college in Mariage Frères in Paristhe century-old tea importer.
“I need folks to really feel like they’re buying in somebody’s dwelling,” Simon Doonan remembers her telling him when Gene Pressman employed him to be the shop’s window supervisor within the mid-Nineteen Eighties; he can be the longtime inventive director and creator of its mischievous window shows.
“Chelsea Passage was an unbelievable mixture of funky trendy furnishings combined with Artwork Deco ceramics and Italian futurism and flea market finds,” mentioned Doonan. “And it was completely different from some other division retailer on the time, which was all chrome and easy-to-clean Formica. It was nuanced and visionary.”
Pressman “actually understood the artwork of choosing luxurious objects of want for the house,” mentioned Wendy Goodman, design editor at New York journal, in an electronic mail. “Belongings you by no means knew you needed however coveted. Chelsea Passage at all times made me need to write a narrative referred to as ‘Issues I will By no means Have’.”
Phyllis Ruth Epstein was born on January 17, 1929, in Queens. Her father, Mortimer Epstein, labored as a wholesaler within the textile trade; Her mom, Dorothy (Schapiro) Epstein, was a baby actress.
Phyllis grew up in New York Metropolis till her mother and father divorced when she was 10, after which her mom remarried and moved the household to Lawrence, NY, on Lengthy Island. Phyllis attended Parsons School, a non-public liberal arts faculty in Iowa that has since closed, and the College of Bridgeport in Connecticut.
When she was 19, she went on a blind date with Fred Pressman. They married a 12 months later and settled on Fifth Avenue earlier than shifting to Harrison, NY, in Westchester County.
Within the early Nineteen Nineties, the Pressmans started one other growth, partnering with the Isetan Firm, a Japanese retail titan, to open Barneys shops throughout the nation and, famously, to construct an extravagant limestone-clad flagship retailer on Madison Avenue. , between sixtieth and 61st streets. However in early 1996, the empire started to crumble and Barneys filed for chapter. Fred Pressman died that summer.
Pressman, his little children, Elizabeth Neubardt and Nancy Dressler, who had labored within the household enterprise most of their lives, remained till 1998. However relations between the brothers turned strained. Robert Pressman, who oversaw the corporate’s funds, was efficiently sued by his sisters for mishandling the household belief fund.
Along with her youngsters, Mrs. Pressman is survived by 11 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. In 2001, she married Joseph Gurwin, who made a fortune, a lot of which she gave away, by manufacturing specialised materials reminiscent of these utilized in bulletproof vests. Mr. Gurwin died in 2009.
Barneys modified palms many instances over the next many years, slowly dropping its status with every iteration. In 2019, as soon as once more in chapter, closed forever.
Barney Pressman had a motto: “Choose, don’t settle.” Throughout her lengthy marriage to Fred, Mrs. Pressman developed a practice of giving him engraved presents — cufflinks, charms, key chains — all embellished with the phrase “I’m so glad I selected and didn’t settle.”
