Emerging Fashion Brands Depended on Barneys. Now What? – Wall Street Journal

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In the wake of the sale, the aforementioned brands will receive “not even close” to the amount of money they are owed, said Susan Scafidi, an attorney and professor at Fordham University in New York who founded the Fashion Law Institute, and has followed the Barneys case closely. Mammoth fashion brands whose retail networks include both their own stores and hundreds of others worldwide “can swallow this [monetary loss] a little more easily,” she added.

For nascent brands, it’s another story. Historically, Barneys has played a key role in introducing once-unfamiliar labels like Giorgio Armani, Azzedine Alaïa and Comme des Garçons to the American shopping masses when they were still considered avant-garde, a risky practice it continued to the very end. In 2002, Julie Gilhart, then the fashion director and senior vice president at Barneys, discovered Proenza Schouler, a brand designed by two New Yorkers who hadn’t yet graduated from college, and bought the pair’s senior-thesis collection to carry in Barneys’s stores. The gamble paid off: The clothes sold and the Barneys buy planted the seed for the success of the label, now a full-fledged American luxury brand carried by stores worldwide.

Over the years, upstart designers have relied on the store to place sizable orders and throw its weight behind supporting their careers. This fall, similarly hopeful brands are adjusting their expectations as they plan for a Barneys-less future.

The designer behind one such brand is Reese Cooper, a 22-year-old British wunderkind based in Los Angeles, whose clothes debuted on the Barneys sales floor this past April. “They were definitely some of my favorite people to work with,” said Mr. Cooper, who created an exclusive men’s collection for Barneys featuring gray chore coats and garment-dyed work pants and praised the creative freedom that the store promoted.

Pre-bankruptcy, Barneys had placed a spring 2020 order with Mr. Cooper, but the ABG acquisition forced him to regroup. Like many of the designers interviewed for this story, Mr. Cooper had agreed to “Net 30” payment terms with Barneys, meaning that the retailer would pay for merchandise 30 days after it is received. The original plan was to ship the order in December but Mr. Cooper realized he’d never receive full payment.

The contracts that Barneys previously signed with designers will “simply disappear into the ether” now, explained the lawyer Ms. Scafidi. A representative for B. Riley Financial said, “it is our understanding that no one is under obligation to ship goods unless those goods were ordered and paid for” after the bankruptcy filing. Fortunately, Mr. Cooper was able to find new buyers for the stock once-destined for Barneys.

CDLP, a Swedish underwear brand that Barneys had carried since 2018, also had to explore an alternate route for its clothes after the ABG acquisition. The brand was set to launch T-shirts with Barneys as its sole retail partner this year. Barneys was forthright about its uncertain future, said the brand’s co-founder and CEO Andreas Palm, but CDLP decided to make the T-shirts anyway. When the bankruptcy orphaned the tees, CDLP decided to list them—minus tags branding them as Barneys exclusives—via its own online shop.

Other brands were not able to change strategy as easily. Rhuigi Villaseñor, designer of Rhude, a high-end streetwear brand, began working with Barneys in 2016 when his company was barely off the ground. “Barneys really taught me to run a business and how to do wholesale,” said the designer.

For Mr. Villaseñor, the biggest loss is what Barneys accomplished for up-and-coming designers like him. As a place where many discerning stylists and buyers first discovered Rhude’s designs, Barneys had significantly raised the burgeoning label’s profile.

“We definitely gained some other accounts due to Barneys,” echoed CDLP’s Mr. Palm. “As a young brand, we did not have the strongest brand recognition. It really meant a lot to work with a place like Barneys.”

Other major retailers can deliver a similar stamp of approval—Bergdorf Goodman and Nordstrom come to mind—but, today, many designers feel safer taking their fates into their own hands. “I’m definitely taking a more targeted approach to my consumer through direct business,” said eyewear designer Garrett Leight, who worked with Barneys for a decade. He is investing in his own online store and opening more brick-and-mortar retail stores, over which he has greater control.

“If you’re not moving to being a [direct-to-consumer] business, you’re kind of a dinosaur,” said Joshua Willis, the co-founder of Article Number, a Los Angeles footwear brand that also held off on shipping Barneys its last order this fall. He is thinking more seriously about his brand’s own e-commerce presence. After watching Barneys go extinct, Article Number and other labels are doing what they can to avoid the same fate.

Write to Jacob Gallagher at [email protected]