Feature

Questrom Authority

Questrom hopes to cash in on the appeal to younger buyers; sales at the Co-op are projected to grow by 40 percent in this year. "It will be very item-oriented and have a quick and constant turnover rate of new pieces by young designers," he says. (Questrom was known at Federated for his "20 percent policy": no more than 20 percent of the merchandise on the floor can be more than three months old.)

Questrom describes the customer the Co-op targets. "It's for a more confident and educated shopper who is not afraid to mix and match -- who shops across the market."

"We're thinking Sarah Jessica Parker's character on Sex and the City: Dolce & Gabbana top, ripped Levi's, Fendi baguette," Weisenfeld offers. Questrom adds, "Because now women wear a jean jacket with the designer dress," identifying the twentysomething uniform. "And people shop across the market." Gap sweater sets are paired with pashminas; $140 Helmut Lang T-shirts are worn with a pair of Canal Street cargo pants.

"Our customer will buy designer items on the fifth floor," Questrom predicts, "and then come up here for weekend pieces -- like for the beach." Within the Co-op, the seventh floor will feature accessories as well as higher-end downtown designers like Prada Sport and Daryl K, while the eighth floor will carry a more casual tier of Juicy Couture and Three Dot T-shirts (not to mention Bond's T-shirts, the Australian undershirts the store can't seem to keep in stock). The eighth floor will also have a twenty-foot denim bar displaying Earl jeans and more obscure dungaree labels from abroad. "There is a denim thing happening right now," Weisenfeld informs, "with that Gucci-feathered-jeans phenomenon." In Gene Pressman's day, capitalizing on last season's Gucci trend, long after the elite fashion house has moved on, would have been as blasphemous as carrying a size 12.

"My friends were telling me," Questrom goes on, "that their daughters were looking for less-pricey designer clothes. At the Co-op, they can find both casual items and career." Weisenfeld quickly interrupts: "I'm sorry; we don't refer to it as career," politely modifying his boss's slip into Federated-style retail-speak.

Questrom, however, has no intention of rolling racks of Charter Club business suits onto the Barneys sales floor. In fact, he has an acute understanding of the Barneys edge, despite some mispronunciations: "We've got Maharachi," Questrom garbles the Maharishi label -- a wildly popular London-based sportswear line that Barneys carried months before Saks Fifth Avenue got it and a year before Old Navy created its $24.99 knockoff version. He knows what's hot and, more important, what sells. "There's an accessories revolution going on in the industry right now," he observes. "There was no interest in handbags or jewelry before; now it's all about beads and fringe and patchwork," all of which will be well stocked in the Co-op.

"Look at Fendi -- three years ago that company couldn't get arrested, and now, with the baguette, it's the hottest company around. We were quick to get on that. The lifeblood of this business is new ideas, but you don't have to always have the first idea."

Questrom is grown-up enough to recognize a profitable idea -- and isn't ashamed to exploit it, either. One colleague recalls bumping into him in Paris recently: "I was wandering around the Left Bank one afternoon and ended up in this remote section, and I walk down the quiet alley and there's Allen in the only shop open, holding a pile of pashmina scarves, trying to broker a deal with the owner -- in English."

Questrom says he's not worried so much about the competition from the recent crop of Madison Avenue hyper-marts like DKNY and Nicole Farhi -- lifestyle destinations with sleek in-house cafes and iMac stations.

"I'm more interested in what they are doing downtown than on Madison Avenue," he says.

"Downtown has more innovation, but most of them are just copying Colette." He knows the Paris shop, with its obsessively edited selection of accessories and clothes, is worshiped by fashion's international set. "I visited the store two years ago when it first opened. I liked it a lot. It had a wonderful display, but it was not well executed. If you wanted to purchase the Japanese high-tech camera and walk out the door with it, you had to wait for a sales assistant to get one from the basement. It took forever."

Questrom enjoys pointing out the trouble spots. He ticks off from a similar mental checklist when he visits the Manhattan boutiques. On Jeffrey, the meatpacking fashion emporium owned by former Barneys shoe-buyer Jeffrey Kalinsky: "I think he has talent, and I respect that he is taking a chance on opening a store in such a remote location. It's not such a nice area at night. The friendly service can be a little overbearing -- I can take it in doses." On Kirna Zabête: "It's nicely edited. They've gotten a lot of press. But it's too soon to tell with any of them."

But Questrom isn't only taking notes. Impressed by the explosion of trendy boutiques opening below 14th Street, he's upping the ante and returning to the old neighborhood, to steal back some of the thunder Barneys lost when it shuttered its 17th Street store.

The latest strategy, which emerged two weeks ago, is to convert Barneys' 17th Street warehouse, just a block west from the original store, into a freestanding Co-op shop. Slated to open this spring, it will offer its lower-priced collection of clothing and accessories as well as some men's items. Barneys buyers were scrambling last week to increase their orders enough to fill the new store.

Kalinsky professes to welcome his former mentors back in the neighborhood -- though the Barney's annex, carrying some of the same vendors, will be only a few blocks north of his store. "I think it's great news," he says.

Questrom sounds like the old retail hand he is when he puts the boutique boom into perspective. "It's no different from in the seventies or eighties. Stores come and go. Look at Charivari. The ones that survive are the ones with new ideas and new designers. We are very good at finding the nobodies."

And according to Questrom, the shops in question only represent one point of view in fashion, while Barneys' offers a fuller scope. Steven Alan, who pioneered the downtown lifestyle-boutique movement when he opened his Wooster Street shop in 1994 and who sells clothing lines to Barneys, agrees: "Kirna Zabête and Zao and some of the NoLIta shops are catering to one shopper. I call it the Face-and-iD-magazine-lifestyle point of view. Barneys knows how to curate a collection, and even if another store sells the same designer, Barneys will buy it differently. Most shops buy deep and shallow -- lots of pieces of one or two styles. But Barneys selects pieces in order to create a story and not dismiss the designer."

This is the reason why designers still kill to get a spot on the Barneys sales floor. "Questrom understands this," Alan continues, "and he won't 'Federate' the store." Questrom knows his core customer and will not push out any Gucci Jackie bags to make room for cut-rate khakis.

"It's still the best department store," Sarah Hailes, co-owner of Kirna Zabête, spins, knowing full well that Barneys is a specialty retailer, not a department store, "with the best selection, best designers, best layout."

Another downtown fashion doyenne gushes: "I love Barneys -- it's the most beautiful store." But then she pauses and admits, "I went there a few weeks ago on a Monday night, and it was dead as a doornail. Fine -- it's midtown on a weeknight -- but across the street DKNY was jumping. Don't get me wrong, I adore Barneys: I dropped $3,000 that night, and I buy most of my clothes wholesale."

So it goes. The extravagant Barneys that won the hearts of the fashion world must now compete in a fashion-retailing universe it helped create. No one seems to recognize this better than Questrom and his peers.

"There's been a lot of backlash against the place," the fashionista admonishes, "but God forbid Barneys wasn't around. What would we do? They educated the retail world."