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.

Quote of the Day (Edwin Heathcote, on the Early Department Store as an ‘Urbane, Well-Lit Refuge’)

“The history of the department store is inseparable from the modern metropolis. It emerged in the late 18^th century as the confluence of conspicuous consumption, a refuge, a paradise and a microcosm of contemporary production. Harding, Howell and Co.’s Grand Fashionable Magazine opened in Pall Mall in 1796 as a big store separated into departments, but the idea was developed by stores like Harrods (founded in 1834 and opened in Knightsbridge in 1849) and Marshall Fields in Chicago and an expanded Le Bon Marche in Paris (both 1852). For the dirty, constantly under-construction and industrial 19th-century city, department stores were an urbane, well-lit refuge from muddy roads, smoke, crime and horse manure. They also offered respectable employment for women who might even be accommodated in dormitories above the stores. They represented liberation. Emile Zola refers to their centrality in the changing status of women in his 1883 novel The Ladies' Paradise, though he also notes the stores were equally a mechanism for monetising feminine desire.” —English architect, designer and critic Edwin Heathcote, “Shop and Awe,” The Financial Times, Aug. 25-26, 2018

Today’s department store is a far cry from its 19^th-century counterpart and it has lost its fair share of cachet, as indicated most recently by the announcement that Macy’s will be closing 125 locations over the next three years.

The conditions that led to the invention of the department store are no more, but that doesn’t mean the format can’t be reinvented. I, for one, will be pulling for this format to endure, even if it’s in a somewhat different than what we’ve gotten used to over the years.

Photo of the Day: Nordstrom NYC Grand Opening Promo

I took the photo accompanying this post almost two weeks ago, during a weekend promotion for the newly opened Nordstrom flagship store in New York City.

The arrival of the department store chain just south of Central Park, on 57^th Street and Broadway, was greeted with lines around the block. Its performance is going to be closely watched, given all that the company has put into the seven-floor, 320,000-sq.-ft. building and the recent performance of the department store segment as a whole.

I could go on and on about the extent to which department stores truly deserve the tepid reception they’ve received from Wall Street lately, but now’s not the time. The retail industry—and New York City—can use a brick-and-mortar success story.

In any case, I am sure I will find myself in the vicinity of this store as we get closer to Christmas, when I can take in its window display.