Quote of the Day (Ginia Bellafante, on the Long-Term Decline of the Department Store)

“If you are in your 20s, department stores have been dying ostensibly for the whole of the time you have been conscious. ‘Lackluster upon lackluster,’ an analyst at Piper Jaffray described the sector in a New Yorker article in 2003 — seven years before Instagram ignited our scrolling addictions, 16 years before the closure of Henri Bendel, 17 before the end of Lord & Taylor and Barneys. The decline might be traced further back, sometime around 1989, when B. Altman shut down on Fifth Avenue. By then, Bloomingdale’s had been abandoned as an urbane meeting ground in romantic comedy (see ‘Manhattan’), replaced by The Sharper Image (see ‘When Harry Met Sally’).”— Fashion critic Ginia Bellafante, “Out of Step With Their Shoppers,” The New York Times, Feb. 8, 2026

The image accompanying this post, looking north across 60th Street at Barneys New York on a cloudy afternoon, was taken on Apr. 17, 2010, by Jim.henderson.

In the mid-1990s, as part of a larger retail tour of New York, I visited Barneys, along with other members of my company and industry marketing researchers. Somebody noticed that my jacket, bought at a more downscale department store, looked an awful lot like one on the racks. It turned out that the merchandise we saw cost seven times more than what I had paid.

In his 2025 memoir, They All Came to Barneys, Gene Pressman depicts the company he managed with his brother Bob as the height of Nineties glamour. Maybe so.

But from that day nearly three decades ago, I became convinced that the store’s merchandise was overpriced. It was a far cry from the discount men’s suit shop his grandfather had founded. When I read the reports of its demise, I figured that pride goeth before a fall.

I was glad that, unlike many casual observers (and even some retail analysts who should have known better), Ginia Bellafonte’s article didn’t attribute the decline of the entire department store sector solely to the Internet.

A single cause is a convenient explanation for everything, but the department store has withered for several reasons, much like the enclosed malls they anchored for decades. I look forward to an entire book that will trace this devolution with the care it deserves.